bricks into bricolage
by tajtis
Summary: She wakes up in the middle of the night knowing two things for certain: that there is the smell of smoke coming from her window, and that Asuma is gone. -— Kakashi/Kurenai. The years and people left behind.
1. one

**AN:** In the midst of me trying to write a post-war Kakashi/Kurenai oneshot (which I am about 10k words in and absolutely hating every single word of that 10k lol), I kept getting sidetracked by this desire to write about Kakashi and Kurenai's relationship through the years that they'd known each other that still mostly follows canon except that they're much, much closer and have a potential for a romantic relationship regardless of Asuma being alive or not (I luv you still, Asuma). I wanted it to be a chaptered fic that, as mentioned, goes through their years from the academy through Naruto and after the war chronologically, but this specific plot point wouldn't stop bugging me lmao, so I just went ahead and wrote it. I'm not quite sure if I'll be able to go ahead and write that multi-chaptered fic I'd mentioned above, but I _am_ going to categorize this fic on the basis of being that multi-chaptered fic I'd ideally want to write (i.e. M-rated, title, romantic pairing tag [even if it they're not quite yet romantic in this chapter]). In the event that I do end up writing it, I might change up the order of chapters or maybe even just go and create a new story post altogether that's separate from this fic. Regardless, I'm now talking too much, so I'll let you read in peace (if you haven't been turned off by the long-winded, ultimately irrelevant author's note, lol). Hopefully it's somewhat interesting of a read!

The fic takes place immediately after Team 10 (afka Team Shikamaru And Only Shikamaru, but w/e, it's not like I'm mad about Ino and Chouji deserving better or anything) + Team 7 defeat Hidan and Kakuzu.

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She wakes up in the middle of the night knowing two things for certain: that there is the smell of smoke coming from her window, and that Asuma is gone.

(Never coming back.

Make that three.)

"Yo," Kakashi says, a hand raised up lazily in greeting, scorch marks lining his bare fingertips. The tatters of his shirt, when he moves to sit from his crouch, smell overwhelmingly like lightning.

There are things Kurenai knows for certain, and yet still, she is disappointed. "You look like hell."

"Ah." Kakashi smiles, unruffled. She can see the hollow beneath his cheekbone through the rip in his mask, the shadows his hair casts over his face without his forehead protector. She tries to remember the last time he'd appeared so disheveled, and finds that she can't. Not for certain. "Is that something to say to your own personal avenger?"

Itachi, she thinks, probably. After the earlier pursuit on Akatsuki, but that she can only know from hearsay. "So it's done?"

His smile doesn't waver, but there's a drastic change in colour to it. Darker, less vibrant. "It's done."

It's in the darkness that her memory comes to light. _Sasuke. Minato. Rin. Obito. His father._ "His team?"

"All safe and sound," Kakashi says, almost sounding impressed, like he hadn't believed that they would be. "Some minor injuries they'll see to in the morning. Nothing that'll last."

The indentation of his mouth straightens once it's been said. Maybe he still doesn't, knows better not to; there are some wounds that are chronic, that will never fully heal regardless of time. "And Shikamaru?"

"Playing favourites now?" Kakashi drawls, but doesn't take too long afterwards to answer her question. "You already know where he is."

Kurenai does, feels the corner of her lips tugging upwards despite herself. "Let's hope he doesn't take after you and start arriving late to things."

"He's a man of his teacher's example," he says tangentially, nothing else, but there is no need for more. Kurenai already knows what that means, too. "How's the other brat?"

His open eye flicks down to her belly, makes her draw up her blanket reflexively; in surprise, because she hadn't thought that he would know, that he would _care_ enough to know, and apprehension, because she is shinobi, and the feeling has been conditioned into her for so long. "How did you—"

"Your boyfriend's meticulous. Had a lot of back-up plans readied," he replies, shifts his weight onto the other half of his body, and under the fluorescence of her street's lighting, he is suddenly more than disheveled: he looks tired, from bone to muscle to flesh. "Really takes after the Third, doesn't he."

It's almost a relief, to see the same exhaustion she feels, on a face outside of a mirror, a face that isn't her own. "Don't let him hear you say that," she says out of habit, before she can truly think about it, but Kakashi is kind enough not to point out her mistake.

She immediately changes the subject, stands up to search for her first aid kit, gives her an excuse to avoid Kakashi's incisive stare. "Come in. I'll dress your wounds."

He slides his legs to dangle off the sill one after the other, drags his feet against her floorboards until he reaches her sofa. She thinks momentarily of reprimanding him for the noise—it is half-past two in the morning, when she bothers to look at her clock, runs out of other options to not meet Kakashi's eyes—but there is a tightness starting just below her throat, like the needle she holds has stitched through her own chest and pulled too tautly at the threads, trying to keep whatever is inside, whatever is left of her, from falling out.

She sheathes her needle, reaches for the bottle of antiseptic, gets to cleaning the minor cuts littering his forearms instead. Clinically, routinely; no thinking required.

"Shizune said my last physical was unremarkable," she says softly, mindlessly, when she's finally able to find her voice, because this requires no thinking, either; to love so surely, so unconditionally, so much, that even when she's trying to hoard it all inside, to shield it away from anyone who could only bring it hurt, she can't.

She does not regret living as a shinobi. She does not regret the loss of blood over the years; not in pinpricks on her thumbs from life-binding contracts, nor in puddles on tatami mats from slitting enemy nins' necks with the kunai she hides beneath night gowns and silk robes. She does not regret all the times that she would come home to the smell of nicotine lining her curtains so potently that it is suffocating, but still not as suffocating as the seals on their tongues, the stipulations of their oaths, forbidding them from voicing the horrors of night and the carnage of day, even to the one person who would understand it most.

She does not regret living as a shinobi, does not regret that it brought him to her just as easily as it had taken him away. But what she does regret is _loving_ as a shinobi: quiet and cautious and fearful, always allowing the next mission to keep her from saying what she has always wanted to say.

But no more. She will love this child— _their_ child—loudly and recklessly and unafraid, and hope, at the end of it all, that it would be enough to keep it safe.

"The baby's healthy," she adds, recalling Shizune's exact words. "No abnormal chakra flaring, no premature defects, no deviation from the standard progression of fetal development."

"Nice," Kakashi hums, as if her words had gone in one ear and out the other, both eyes shut as he leans his head back over the armrest of her couch. Kurenai knows Kakashi as much as anyone can truly know someone who doesn't want to be known, but she is an expert in masks and deceit. She knows, at the very least, when he is putting on an illusion, knows when he is pretending not to pay attention.

Even when he is cloaked in fatigue and on the brink of sleep, he is always paying attention. "Hold your shirt up for me."

He complies willingly and without comment, rolls the hem of the garment up to the bottom of his chest. It reveals a foot-long gash across his abdomen that is deep enough to require stitching but not enough that she should be alarmed for his well-being. He is no longer bleeding out, anyhow; from the darkened edges, she can tell that he has already cauterized most of the wound himself.

"Sloppy," she murmurs under her breath, picks her needle back up and sterilizes it with a shake of her head. "You couldn't let Sakura see to this first?"

"Mhm." The sound comes from somewhere low in his throat, incomprehensible. "She was busy."

Kurenai doesn't truly know Kakashi, not in all the ways that count, but she knows him to be more self-preserving than this. "Too busy to spare a minute to heal a small wound?"

"Naruto," he says simply, and Kurenai's hand halts before her needle can breach skin. "Did a real number on himself with his new technique."

She takes a calming breath, pushes the tip in and begins sewing. "But he's alright?"

She knows the answer before he says it, before she even finishes asking. Kakashi wouldn't be here in her apartment if he wasn't. "Going to be."

She doesn't know why he _is_ here in the first place.

"This won't be too long," Kurenai says belatedly, ignores the idle thought, but Kakashi grunts his affirmation and reclines back in his seat and doesn't complain about the pain. He has experienced far worse; they both have.

They resume their lull of silence, Kurenai working gently at Kakashi's wound as he quietly dozes off. She has done this plenty of times before, has mapped out the same wiry sinews on other bodies as she does on Kakashi's right now: on comrades and civilians, on the field and off. On herself, once, but on Asuma, the most; thirteen, and he was all skin and bones, wielding his blades for the first time and without practice that he had ended up slicing himself in his arrogance; twenty, and he had grown muscle much larger than the rest of their batchmates, but not enough to outmatch his own father in their first physical fight and their final moment of honesty for the next couple of years; twenty-seven, and he is much bulkier than she remembers, but still as idiotic as to sneak up behind her as she tends to her garden, gets her shears embedded to his side in the same way that his lips become embedded to hers; thirty-one, and he is sloppier, stores just as much fat in his stomach from all the barbecue he eats, overlooks a blind spot when a rogue nin attacks, and she is so angry at him for his carelessness that she demands he learn how to stitch her up when their child has to eventually be cut open from her due to the stress of having someone as cocky as him for a husband—

And suddenly her hands are shaking, her breaths coming in shallow pants, and she thinks _Asuma is gone_ , thinks _he is never_ _coming back_ , thinks it over and over and over in her head—

"Hey." —until Kakashi's voice breaks through her thoughts, strong and steady and not one bit as somnolent as before— "You ever think about it?"

—and the novelty of it all prompts her to try and recentre herself enough to respond— "Think about what?"

"How much he really takes after the Third," he says, looks her straight in the eye with only the utmost seriousness and sincerity, and then, "Like in bed. Or...you know." Both of his eyes flit down briefly to his groin—

—and it is so twisted, so normal, so _Kakashi_ in its concept and execution, that she is still shaking to her very core, but out of unbridled laughter now more than anything as soul-wrenching as earlier. "God, you're—you're fucking _sick_."

"Weren't you ever curious?" he shrugs, lounges back into the couch and closes his eyes, as if he hadn't ever been awoken. "It's a valid question."

"Hush," she scolds mildly, her laughter stopping, but so does her trembling. "You'll mess me up."

"Wouldn't want that," he mumbles blearily, but poses no combat for the rest of her needlework.

She finishes stitching his wound up, gives it a last cleanse before dressing it in gauze, doesn't shake or lose breath or dwell in the absolutes of her thoughts, and then she is packing up her equipment as she tells him, "This is the most I can do. The rest, an actual medic-nin has to check out for you."

"Got it," he says, as if he hadn't ever been asleep, and stands up from her couch with an audible pop of his joints before making his way back to her window, feet still dragging evenly against wood.

This is how she remembers seeing Asuma last: with his back turned, walking away, leaving the scent of smoke and words unsaid in his trail. "Kakashi."

This is _not_ how she remembers seeing Asuma last: crouched upon her windowsill, neck craned backwards, sparing her a cursory glance. "Yeah?"

"Thank you." She vows never again to remember anyone as she last remembers Asuma. "For everything."

Kakashi looks at her for a long few seconds, that same shrewd, calculating stare, but this time, Kurenai doesn't look away. "Let's be friends, ne, Kurenai?"

Kurenai recoils. He has always been so unpredictable, but she doesn't know whether to be grateful or resentful that he has run the gamut of unpredictability with her just in one night. "I—"

He disappears before she can answer, and it is just as well; she doesn't have one to give that isn't a question itself, anyway. _Aren't we already?_

"Oi!" There is an aggressive pattern of knocking coming from below her, the voice of her landlord weedy through the cracks of her floor. "How many times do I have to tell you to keep it quiet up there? I swear to God, one of these days—"

She will be evicted: for the footsteps in the early morning and the smell of smoke permeating through the vents and the copious amounts of cigarette butts falling from her fourth-floor balcony. She has heard it all before. "Sorry, Sugimoto-san."

"We'll see who's really sorry in the morning!" her landlord grumbles.

The smell of smoke is difficult to uproot from wood, though; it will never truly disappear, just as much as she will never truly want it to.

Even so, she will remain.

(This, she now knows for certain, too.)

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 **AN:** Damn, even _more_ notes? lmao but I just want to say how much I love that whole scene right before Asuma leaves for the Akatsuki pursuit between Kakashi, him, and Kurenai (where Asuma visits Kakashi in the hospital, wanting to say something to Kakashi, only to be interrupted by Kurenai's entrance, and Kakashi being like "but I want to know now..." lol). I've always loved the jounin-sensei quartet, and wished there were more scenes of them being friends (don't even get me started on how much Kurenai's potential was wasted in the series lol), and I just wanted to kind of touch upon on the Kakashi/Kurenai side of the square re: Asuma's death. You have Kakashi going off to avenge Asuma and then Kurenai going through the grief only a lover can go through, separately, and I just wanted to explore on how it could come together (also, as it now may be obvious, Kakashi/Kurenai was one of my favourite rare(crack?)-ships when I used to be obsessed with Naruto a long, long time ago, lol).


	2. two

**AN:** I've decided to just go on ahead with this story as a separate entity from the one I was describing in my author's note in the previous chapter. I'm still not sure if I'll be able to write that other story lol, but I've also always wanted to write a Kakashi/Kurenai fic that developed after Asuma's death, so here we are!

This chapter takes place just before Team 7 + Team 8 (minus Kurenai...but how awesome would it have been if she could've come?) leave to search for Itachi/Sasuke.

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The last of her poppies dies on the twelfth morning leading into winter; petals blowing in through her window, landing atop the scroll unfurled across her dining table, streaking brown-red against parchment white. The sight reminds her of congealed blood, drying and cracking against pounds of flesh.

(Asuma is gone.)

For twelve mornings, her eyes have glazed over the contents of the scroll, trying to make sense of the sum total of each individual word.

 _Sarutobi Asuma's quarters will be vacated by the end of the month to conclude the grieving period of his death. Please retrieve any belongings that you wish to keep in his memory._

(Never coming back.)

She rolls the scroll back up, dried poppy petals still enclosed within, and eats the breakfast she has let gone cold.

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Over their years of—not exactly friendship, she's come to realize; Kakashi is right, as he always is, in that they merely share a professional camaraderie, as all shinobi in arms do—there is only one thing she has come to expect from Kakashi: the unexpected.

He stands in front of her apartment building, the length of his spine and the sole of his foot leant languidly against the outmost portion of the veranda. When he turns his head upon her arrival, she sees his favoured book held in one hand, the pages earmarked and yellowing from age and overuse, bindings ripped and peeling at both ends.

Not entirely unexpected, then. The familiarity burns something warm in her chest against the biting chill of the morning air, of the phantom she carries around with her at all times of the day.

"Looks like it's gonna rain soon," he states indifferently, stores his book away into his back pouch and pries himself off the pillar with an easy push of his foot. His one eye rakes over her attire, with the kind of perfunctory interest she has seen him pore over a mission summons in the past—from the neckline of her dress to where it ends midway down her calves, along the flared sleeves of her sweater and onto her hoodless cape. From anyone else, she would expect it to be an inspection of concern, but with Kakashi, she doesn't ponder the possibility.

"The cold doesn't bother me," is her response, lets her sweater hang open like his cloak, as if it isn't the wrong answer to a question he hadn't asked, as if to prove a point. Nowadays, she finds, she is always proving a point.

To his credit, Kakashi only nods, doesn't argue any further. "I bumped into Shikamaru at the Hokage Tower. Said he had an urgent mission to attend to, and that he's sorry he won't be able to come with you to your check-up."

She tries not to let her relief show. Shikamaru is a well-meaning boy—a well-meaning _man_ , she supposes, now that he has shouldered the weight of a fallen comrade home; of the legacy of his name, survived by and engraved on a loved one's epitaph—but he treats her too softly, with too much respect and obligation for his duty, self-imposed or otherwise.

To be shinobi is to be strong, but Kurenai is more than that; she is _kunoichi_ , which requires her to be even stronger, and she has never done too well with being seen as fragile.

"Thank you for letting me know," she says cordially, and Kakashi pays it in kind with another nod. "Will that be all?"

"No," he says, slides both of his hands inside the pockets of his pants. "I need to talk to you about something."

Kurenai has never expected much of anything from Kakashi, and so she has learned how to temper her surprise along with it. "Will it take long? The hospital's a ten minute walk from here and Shizune's already expecting me—"

"Ten minutes is all I need," Kakashi interjects judiciously, unassuming smile denting the fabric of his mask, starts walking towards the direction of the hospital without giving her much of a choice or a chance to protest. "Let's talk on the way there."

She has never needed to be taken care of, that much is true, but she has also never been this alone. For now, she lets him, if only because taking care of her is not something he is liable to do.

She catches up to him—or he slows down for her, Kurenai isn't entirely sure—but he stays silent for an entire block, so she takes it upon herself to prompt the discussion. "What was it that you wanted to talk to me about?"

Across the street, a local fish vendor setting up his stall waves at Kakashi, calls out his name to greet him a _good morning!_ and him alone. Kurenai almost feels ignored, but it is of no significant offence to her; the only thing worse than being invisible, she's learned, is becoming subjected to anyone's pity. "I'm thinking of taking your team along with mine for a mission."

She has not seen them in close to two weeks, she thinks, not for their lack of trying. There is only so much concern a person can take before it transforms into that same pity she despises. "And you're...asking me for permission?"

"Is it granted?" he asks, waves back genially to the vendor before facing her completely.

She frowns. "It's not mine to grant."

"Then no, I'm not," he replies, always with that round-about way of talking of his. Maybe it is why they have never truly been friends; Kurenai has always hated riddles. "I'll ask for some insight into their individual skills and team dynamics instead."

"Don't their shinobi profiles hold that type of information?" she asks, but supposes that it is futile of a question. Kakashi is efficient, doesn't take any unnecessary actions for the most serious of matters. This mission must thus be high-risk, ignites the worry deep inside her stomach like a seal gone wrong. "What's it for?"

"A search and capture," he answers, doesn't dally on delivering unfortunate news, either. "On Uchiha Itachi."

The image of Kakashi flickers through her mind's eye: knees dropping to the water, eyes glassed over in pain, the whites of his sclera veined blood red as he lies unconscious and bedridden for a month. "Why now?"

"Orochimaru's been killed," he starts, pauses, just a tiny flash of emotion marring his face to override his efficiency, and then nothing at all, "By Sasuke. Which means he's probably gotten whatever training it is that he wanted from him, and that he'll finally be going after his brother next."

The dread thickens its way up to her throat. "You're going to use him as bait," she mumbles lowly in realization. This time, it is the image of Kiba that stains her vision, his own kunai the only thing keeping him from bleeding out through his gut, Akamaru all but bounty fodder in his lifeless arms. "You seem to be forgetting who you're dealing with."

"I think I'm getting the hang of them, actually," Kakashi says lightly, as if catching the Akatsuki is a skill one can perfect with more practice, like a jutsu, or a kata, "I didn't even need to be carried home the last time."

There is no image of Asuma to conjure, because he hadn't come home; not in the way Kakashi did, which she will never begrudge him for, but it is getting harder and harder by the day to avoid questioning the way lightning chooses to strike.

"Hidan and Kakuzu aren't Itachi." Hidan and Kakuzu aren't Itachi, and still, Asuma had died. He was out of his depth—they all were—and still, he had been sent off without so much as a hitch of a breath. She knows the kind of missions she has led her team on, knows the kind of repercussions that the one Kakashi is proposing now would entail. They are far worse than being out of their depth; they are _children_.

She could be angry. She could be angry, or spiteful, or consumed by her loss, but she is kunoichi. So she will compartmentalize better than most and will not bat an eye when she or the people she cares for are sent off to do what the country she protects—the country she _chose_ to protect—requires of her, even when it asks her of too much.

"You doubt your team?" Kakashi asks, so nerve-gratingly casual even in his accusations.

"I don't doubt my team," she snaps, the sound of her voice echoing against the empty din of the roads, along with the scrape of her sandals against gravel when she comes to an abrubt halt. "I _know_ my team. They're no match for Akatsuki, nor either of the Uchiha."

When he turns around to face her, the blankness of his features almost align to look like an apology, but his voice is firm in his conviction when he says, "And I know mine. Yamato and Sai are still with us, and Naruto and Sakura are more than capable of assisting your team if they ever need it."

"Aren't they after Naruto?" she challenges, resumes walking in her attempt to quell the sudden restlessness that settles just beneath her skin. "What if he gets captured? What happens then?"

"Naruto can handle himself," Kakashi assures, effortlessly matches step beside her, just as effortlessly as he humiliates her with, "Unless you doubt him as well."

"No," she says stonily, means it. Asuma believed in Naruto—he had told her that day she had learned of her pregnancy, the very same day he had been assigned to his four man cell—and so she will carry on living his will. "Stop it, Kakashi."

He doesn't, but it hardly matters; everything she has said, has run circles around avoiding—it all boils down to this, "So it's me you doubt."

She opens her mouth to answer, fire forming at the tip of her tongue, but no sound comes out. Kakashi is right, as he always is.

"Does it matter?" Kurenai sighs. For the last twelve mornings—for the past _month_ —all she has been doing is fighting against things she has no control over, and she is tired of it. "When do you leave?"

There is another block of silence, just the heavy scuff of his footsteps resounding between them as they navigate the floor her examination is to take place in, until Kakashi answers, "Today," and proves her assumption right.

It was never her permission he was asking for. "Of course." It was never hers to grant, anyways.

"Oh, Kurenai. Just in time," Shizune greets cheerfully when she steps out of her office, nose buried in the stack of folders perennially encased in her arms, but it fades off quickly into annoyance when she looks up and sees Kakashi standing at a distance beside her. "What are you doing here? Your squad was supposed to leave over half an hour ago, Sakura's at the Hokage Tower right now wondering where the hell you are!"

"My bad," Kakashi says sheepishly, with an apologetic smile, and it is as if nothing had happened, like their dispute over the same core issue hadn't transpired just a few minutes ago. "I was on my way to the gates when I remembered that I had a promise to fulfill to a friend, and I lost track of the time."

Kurenai knows when Kakashi is putting up an act, but she never knows what it is he is hiding, has long given up trying to find out. All the same, she stares up at him in intrigue, can't help but wonder about his intentions, of where any of his loyalties actually lie.

"Whatever," Shizune rolls her eyes, seemingly unaware of the situation, of Kakashi's true reason for being late. "Just head over there before Sakura and Tsunade-sama decide to render you too incapacitated to lead."

"Right," Kakashi says, clasps his travel cloak at the neck, and it is his turn not to meet her gaze, even as he departs with a neutral, "Well. It was nice seeing you, Kurenai," directed her way.

"You too," she murmurs quietly, but he wouldn't have heard it either way; Kakashi has already dissipated in a cloud of smoke, the lingering whiff of lightning the only indication that he was ever really there to begin with.

"You'd think he'd be less inclined to be tardy when he's got such a dangerous mission coming up," Shizune comments in distaste, before turning guiltily towards Kurenai with a cautious smile, as if just remembering her presence, "I don't suppose he mentioned anything about it to you, did he?"

"He did," Kurenai answers after a moment's hesitation, and Shizune gives her a consoling look that Kurenai has grown to resent. "He's taking my team with him."

"They'll be alright," Shizune smiles, but it is incomplete, as if her mouth had acted before her mind could truly believe in what she was saying. "I mean, for all his borderline irresponsible quirks, Kakashi's always stepped up when it counted." The corner of her lips pull up higher, more surely, with her next words. "He won't let anything bad happen to them if he can help it."

It is not his dedication she doubts. "I know," she says, along with her own convincing smile, sees the tension seep out of Shizune's shoulders like poison extracted, a genjutsu dispelled. Kurenai is proficient in sensing illusions, but her mastery has always been at putting up her own. "Should we get on with the check-up, then?"

"Come on in," Shizune says enthusiastically, and for the meantime, Kurenai allows herself to be absorbed in the jargon and routine of Shizune's prenatal work.

Outside of her office window, the rain has started to pour. Just as Kakashi had warned her. It is only when she hears the thunder rumble does she let her mind wander of its own accord, lets it rest on her conclusions, the questions it brings forth.

It was never her permission he was asking for. He wasn't asking her of anything, if she were to truly think about it.

 _I had a promise to fulfill to a friend_ , his voice repeats in her head, before she shuts it off entirely, compartmentalizing as she does best.

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	3. three

**AN:** A back-to-back update, because the muse wouldn't leave me alone haha. I'm writing this as I go along (although I already have a general premise of how the story will unfold), so most updates will be sporadic. Thank you for the favs, follows, and reviews, I truly appreciate them all (don't ever be afraid to tell me what you think, good or [respectfully] bad!).

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It's the flowers that get her.

She had given it to him on his last birthday in bagloads of potpourri instead of bouquets as a joke, in the off-chance that it would be able to rid off the thousands of cigarettes he had smoked into every last bit of his furniture over the years. Marriage is about compromise, she had told him, and she had lived with her clothes smelling like nicotine for long enough. It was no real wonder why their relationship was the worst kept secret in the village; Asuma had never stopped smoking around her, and Kurenai had never taken kindly to wearing much perfume.

He had just laughed, told her that marriage is about loving each other for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, and when he had pulled her in for a kiss, he had tasted like ash and eternity.

(Until death do them part.)

"Are you alright, Yuuhi-san?" The clansman tasked with showing her around the compounds looks at her in commiseration, cups a palm over her shoulder that feels more invasive than it is comforting. She has probably learned more about the Sarutobi lands in five years of clandestine meetings than he will ever learn in his entire lifetime of formal lessons. She has no use for his guidance, nor his sympathy.

"I'm fine," she lies, shakes his hand off with a shrug. "I just—need a minute."

"Take all the time you need," he nods in understanding, even as his arm drops dejectedly to his side. "I'll be in the courtyard. Please feel free to find me when you wish to leave."

"I will." Kurenai almost feels sorry, but not enough to be true to her word; when she feels herself choking on the scent of dried roses, she exits his quarters alone, in stealth, just as she had numerous times before.

Just as she always will from now on, she thinks acidly, and flees before she can choke on the thought, too.

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She hears them before she sees them. More than anyone, she would know what being ensconced in defeat and regret sounds like, knows every beat to a funeral procession against asphalt roads.

When she does see them, they are chasmed into three small divisions: her three pupils—not really pupils, she reminds herself, and not really hers, either, whatever they may now be—muttering in low tones amongst themselves, Akamaru trotting along beside them with his tail woefully hung limp; Yamato and Sai, standing as if misplaced, watching as Kakashi bends his head down to talk to Naruto, whose primary focus seems to alternate between Sakura's silhouette, long since separated from the rest of the group, and the meandering crack of ground below him, wishing as if to be swallowed by it whole.

There is no sign of Itachi to be found, nor that of Sasuke. She looks at Naruto trying to leave, at Kakashi trying to stop him, and she thinks, maybe not more than anyone. Maybe not even regret. Her losses had always been in wholes, unquestionable and irrevocable. To lose someone in bits and pieces the way they have Sasuke, with the hope of getting him back hanging precariously in front of them like a tag ready to explode, a noose—it takes a particular kind of person to survive that, a unique type of strength to withstand.

Strength, or numbness. The line between the two has already started to blur for her.

"Kurenai-sensei!" Kiba exclaims jovially, jogs the few feet she has left to cover. "Don't tell me you walked all the way here just wearing that? It's freezing out here!"

She had actually dressed appropriately for the weather today, but in her haste, had left her jacket over at the Sarutobi compound. She does not tell Kiba this; although she is more than happy to see them all unharmed, she is not as happy about the worrying they would surely do if they ever found out that she has taken on the task of—and failing at—cleaning up the remainders of Asuma's belongings, all on her own. "I'm alright, really. I was already close by when I overheard that your squad was returning soon, and I wanted to make sure to greet you before you all headed down to give your report."

"Were you over at Shikamaru-kun's?" Hinata asks, with a soft smile, but her eyes are trained somewhere just behind Kurenai's left shoulder, brows slowly knitting together in concern. Kurenai doesn't need to look to know what has her distracted; for once, she is even glad of it.

"Yes," she says, lies once more. It is good enough to convince Kiba and Hinata: almost as soon as the word is out of her mouth, Kiba instantly delves into the semantics of their mission, the cogs they played in the machine, while Hinata checks out of the conversation and blatantly stares Naruto's way, lips downturned in the weight of all the words she has let accumulate over the last twelve years.

It is Shino that is the problem. Kurenai is an expert at false images, but Shino's kikaichu exist on a different plane of projection; one that does not deal in human logic but in an animalistic sense of danger, instinct overruling melodic rhymes or sugar-coated reasons.

"Sensei," Shino says, the first word he utters ever since they've arrived, even as Kiba provokes, and Hinata is absent, and Kurenai becomes more and more transparent. "If you need someone to talk to—we are always available."

She is not proud of it, but she often forgets that Shino is not his kikaichu. That Shino is human, just as Kiba and Hinata are; just as Kurenai is, even if she tries to shut that part off, tries to contain all of her emotions in carefully crafted cages so as not to self-destruct.

Hinata is her favourite, and Kiba, her light, but Shino—

"Then I'd like to take you all out for dinner tomorrow, if you're available," is all she says in acknowledgement, but she does not worry; Shino has always been the one to understand her best.

"You really mean that, sensei?" Kiba perks up, like a puppy found after being abandoned. Even Hinata has come to full attention, manages to tear her eyes away from whatever sight Naruto is making behind her to look up at her buoyantly.

Kurenai doesn't know why she had ever thought she could avoid them and not miss them as terribly as she does now. "My treat. You can tell me all about your mission then."

Kiba deflates in dismay. "What, you don't wanna hear about it now? But I was just starting to get to the good—"

"She said tomorrow, Kiba," Shino cuts in firmly, to Kiba's slight growl and Hinata's gentle giggle, "We will be by your apartment around seven at night to pick you up, if that is alright with you."

"That's fine by me," Kurenai smiles warmly, and then does something she hasn't done in a while, not since they were genins fresh out of the Academy, not yet permanently hardened by the realities of being shinobi: she wraps her arms around all three of them in a hug. "I'm glad you're all safe."

Still, they have never been a team made for sentiment, so she lets them go before they can fully relax into her hold, lets them shift their eyes bumblingly and uncomfortably as they walk towards the tower. She stands alone in their wake, but doesn't quite feel like she is.

When she turns around to look behind her, it becomes a different story altogether: she catches Naruto yanking his arm out of Kakashi's grip, finally storming off, done with listening to his lecture, if he ever truly was. She watches Kakashi as he watches Naruto; watches the way his back slouches lower than it already does normally, watches the way the hand that had held Naruto just seconds ago curls into a fist, how each knuckle pallors like corpses overnight.

Yamato and Sai have already gone. It is just her and him, standing deserted in the streets, and suddenly she is more than alone; she is cripplingly, paralyzingly lonely.

It is not his dedication she doubts; it is his understanding. She realizes now that she is a fool to have ever done so.

 _I had a promise to fulfill to a friend_. She does not make it a habit to be indebted to anyone, much less a friend, but they have never been friends.

Maybe now is the time to start.

She walks up to him hesitantly, not wanting to scare him—nor the ghosts surrounding him—off. "Hey."

It's instantaneous, the way his face shutters off in a barricade, but Kurenai has already seen past it, has already seen enough. "Still inviting frostbite, are we?"

"It's silent company, at least," Kurenai counters mildly, tries for a smile, but she has never been much of a comedian, doesn't think she can stomach his special brand of fake levity at the moment. "You alright?"

"Hm," he hums cryptically, neither a yes or a no, but it's something. Kurenai figures that it is as good as she's going to get from Kakashi; in matters of divulgence, vulnerability, Kakashi does not discriminate between friend or foe. That, above all, has always been his primary danger.

Mirages have never intimidated her, which is why Kakashi doesn't, either. "I have a jacket. I just left it at the Sarutobi compound by accident."

"Left it by accident," he parrots robotically, but the rest of his body seems to have been jump-started out of his stupor, feet shuffling down the main road leading to the Hokage Tower. "Seems like a lot of accidents have happened over there in the last three months."

"Not like that," she answers swiftly, covers a hand over the burgeoning bump on her stomach and her hair over the blooming heat on her face, walks staunchly beside him regardless of his teasing. "I had it when I went there earlier this afternoon."

He doesn't look at her, not like how she expects others would. The knot in his jaw shifts to unclench, but that is the most of his show of sympathy. "So they asked you to clear out, huh."

It is refreshing, enlightening. To be sure that she won't break, she has to be _handled_ like she cannot be broken. "About two weeks ago, but I only got around to doing it now."

"Better late than never," he says sagely, glances at her through the corner of his eye. "You alright?"

"Hm," she speaks in reticence, tries the language he is fluent in most. If nothing else, she is gradually learning how to compromise, the right moments for her to fold.

He must appreciate it; when she chances her own glance upwards, his cheekbones have risen in what she can only presume is a smile.

"You heading back over there?" Kakashi asks, after a few long, wordless minutes. It is only then that she notices that the turn for the short path is already a sizeable distance behind her, and that Kakashi has stopped walking at the bifurcation point.

And then, she realizes: for those few long, wordless minutes, her mind had been at peace. "I guess so."

She walks back to where Kakashi stands, contemplates on how to bid him goodbye. She thinks, _I'm sorry for doubting you_ , thinks, _for Asuma,_ thinks, _for Sasuke_ , thinks, _let's be friends._ In the end, all she says is, "Thank you," and trusts that Kakashi— _see underneath the underneath!—_ will know all that she means by it.

She doesn't expect him to follow her. Doesn't _want_ to expect him to follow her. Which she guesses is why she should have expected it all along.

"What are you doing?" she finally asks, after about five minutes more of him walking parallel to her on the opposite side of the narrow brick road. "The Hokage Tower's the other way."

"Yes." He drags the syllable out, as if speaking to a child, lifts a finger to point straight ahead. "But the Sarutobi compound's _that_ way."

"Don't you have to give your report to the Fifth?" she questions warily, her peace broken, defenses back on high alert.

"Yamato can handle it," Kakashi shrugs. "I've got another matter to attend to."

She bristles, has had enough of being coddled and patronized. She had almost thought Kakashi would be different. "Look, Kakashi—"

"Let's not misunderstand, now," he cuts her off seamlessly, rummages underneath his cloak, pulls out a small scroll and tosses it for her to catch.

The Sarutobi clan emblem is sealed into wax at the rim of the rolled paper. When she draws the scroll open, the black ink strokes form words that have already been seared into her brain: _Sarutobi Asuma's quarters will be vacated by the end of the month to conclude the grieving period of his death. Please retrieve any belongings that you wish to keep in his memory._ "They gave you this?"

"About a week after they gave you yours," Kakashi replies, tilts his head up to the sky. "Maybe they thought I was his friend, too."

He says it pleasantly, with no hint of malice, but Kakashi doesn't ever say things without an angle. "I never doubted that," she murmurs, tries to swallow down her shame.

"I never said you did," he says, in the same flippant tone that he comments, "This lousy weather really won't let up," just seconds later.

If his plan of attack was to wound, then he has succeeded. "I appreciate all of this—" she can still neither qualify nor quantify what _this_ exactly is— "but you're not beholden to any of his promises. Not if it's made on my behalf."

He holds a hand out in front of him, palm up, as if feeling for the first drops of rainfall. "Shikamaru would beg to differ."

"Yes, but that's Shikamaru. You're—" she stops, can't determine who Kakashi really is, either, but that is nothing new. "—Kakashi."

"Interestingly put," he says blandly, after a few beats of silence, but there is a detectable hint of amusement somewhere in his voice. "But either way, it's not him I'm fulfilling promises to."

 _Then to who?_ she doesn't get to ask, because the Sarutobi clansman from before lands right in front of them from the surrounding foliage.

"You disappeared from our premises without warning, Yuuhi-san. We were worried," he says with a harried frown. Kurenai purses her lips, doesn't honour it with a response, ignores Kakashi's curious stare on the side of her face.

As if to continue defying her commands, the clansman turns to bow at Kakashi, who has already closed in on the three metres' divide between them without her knowledge. "Hatake-san. We were not expecting you for a couple more days."

"My mission ended early," Kakashi explains conversationally, but ends the topic right there. "Same way to Asuma's room as always?"

"Yes," the clansman affirms, asks something completely different from what he looks like he wants to ask, judging from the peek of suspicion he juggles between the two of them, "Will you need help with directions?"

"Nah." Kakashi waves a lax hand in dismissal, before stuffing it back into his pocket. "His wife can lead the way."

She will hand it to Kakashi: unorthodox as they may be, his methods prove effective; there are no remnants of pity or suspicion lacing the clansman's face any longer, only stunned and scandalized silence.

It will be a headache to smooth this all out with the clan elders when word eventually spreads—which it will, because the Sarutobi is a relatively small clan with disproportionately big mouths—but for right now, she indulges a little in the impending chaos, the reprieve it gives her from their mournful looks.

"You knew?" she asks Kakashi, once she is back on his trail. "All this time?"

And once more, he falls into step beside her. "I helped pick out the ring," he reveals, as if it isn't that monumental of a detail.

Kakashi had never been different, she surmises. He was always looking out for her—for _them_ —in the only way he's known how.

It is not as infuriating a thought as it was before, Kurenai finds. This, she can tolerate; here, she can finally feel like an _equal_.

"It's beautiful." She thumbs at the ring on her left hand, twists it once around her fourth finger. "For someone with such tacky preferences in reading material, you have surprisingly good taste in jewelry."

"I wouldn't slander my choice in literature so soon," Kakashi says mysteriously, foreboding, slides the shoji doors of Asuma's room open with utmost finesse, only to start coughing lamely at the fumes of roses that immediately invade their senses, but she doesn't find it nearly half as bad.

She laughs. For the first time in weeks, it comes from someplace genuine.

Hopeful.

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Her tranquility ebbs with the downpour of the rain.

There is nothing material she wishes to keep, she decides, neither hers nor his. She can sort through boxes and drawers of possessions more than she already has these past two hours, but there is no better organization than what she already holds storage in the aisles of her memory.

Little by little, she learns how to let go.

(Has to.)

Kakashi drops a book in her lap. "Found it."

An orange bodice, with a _Restricted_ symbol embossed on the back. When she runs her fingers along the spine, the kanji unsurprisingly reads, _Icha Icha Paradise_. "Not being able to take it out of your pouch for three days doesn't really count as losing it, Kakashi."

"Try three years," Kakashi says, pads his feet somewhere to the left of her to slump down against the side of the bed, just a few feet from where she sits cross-legged in front of Asuma's desk. Kurenai thinks this is the closest thing to whiny as Kakashi has ever sounded in her presence. "Asuma's usually really good at returning the things he borrows. Guess he needed all the inspiration he could get."

Another reason why they have never truly been friends: his off-colour humour. "He did _not_ borrow that from you."

"No need to be embarrassed, Kurenai," he drawls, rests both elbows up on the mattress above him, draws one knee close to his chest languorously. "If the night of conception was exactly as it was on page 179, then you'll have some very romantic stories to tell your child."

She just laughs again, can't seem to stop now that she's started. Asuma has never been able to keep secrets from her for too long. Wherever he is right now (here), she would like to think that he is laughing along with her in the relief of not having to share this particular one out loud.

(Asuma is gone, but not really; he is never coming back, because he has never truly left.)

"For both of our benefits, I'm going to pretend you never said that," she says, once she has contained her laughter into a smile, raps her knuckles against the hard cover and finds the noise it makes to be oddly hollow.

Kakashi says something breezy in response, something vaguely facetious, but it barely registers in her ears; when she opens the book to investigate the cause of the sound, an unopened packet of cigarettes comes tumbling out, followed by a hastily scribbled note in Asuma's haphazard penmanship.

 _To dispose of along with this book_ , it says in sharp, even strokes, and then, more shakily, _Get your act together! Y_ _ou're going to be a father._

(She had been _this_ close—this close to believing the lies she tells herself.)

"You haven't cried yet," Kakashi says without affect, after several moments of her meticulously counting her breaths in her head; neither mean-spirited nor impatient, just a mere observation that he has chosen to air out.

 _I've cried_ , she thinks to say, but it is not likely that he is wrong; he is just not _around_. So he would miss the one time that she did cry—savagely, agonizingly, wretchedly—on that day that Shikamaru had broken the news, and then he would never see her cry again; not during his funeral, nor during her routine check-ups, nor during all the nights she would pry her eyes open and realize that her nightmares do not end just because she is awake.

"You can cry now, if that's what you want to do," Kakashi says, voice and face an empty slate, but his gaze drills through her like someone who holds the worst knowledge inside, just a little too close to the surface. "I won't think any differently of you in the morning."

Tears are a luxury to a shinobi, but kunoichi do not live in luxury. "So can you," she says, smiles bitterly. Her eyes, when she turns to look at him, are completely dry. "But I won't hold it against you if you don't."

So is his. "Maybe you should," he murmurs lowly, keeps the contact for a second more, before standing up and closing off with a final, "I'll walk you home."

She clutches onto the box of cigarettes tightly, crushingly; lets go. "Okay."

It is still raining in torrents when they leave the compound. Kakashi gives her his cloak to wear over her own jacket for the use of its hood, and walks beside her drenched to the bone.

Under the steady trickle of water down his face, he almost looks to be crying.

"Thank you," she says again when they arrive at her apartment, all that she can ever seem to say. "Here—" She moves to unzip his cloak, only reaches down to the collar before Kakashi's tugging at the top of the hood to keep it from slipping off her head.

"Keep it for now," he says, almost inaudible against the splattering of rain, takes a step forward to compensate. "I'm already soaked, anyways."

"Alright," she says, doesn't have the energy to argue. He nods, turns on his feet, back hunched and clothes hanging off of him like the scarecrow of his name, and suddenly she has made her decision. "Kakashi—"

He cranes his neck backwards, like that night he had waited on her window and proven who he was loyal to, "Yeah?"

"If you ever need to talk," she says, has learned more from her students than she can ever hope to teach them, than they will ever know, "About anything—I'm available."

Like that night, he stares at her without giving anything away— "What's this now?"

—and like that night, the question is posed, but she is the one to ask it, "Let's be friends."

There are no almosts to the way the wet fabric of his mask stretches in his smile, before he leaves entirely.

.

.

.

Much later, when she is shaking the droplets of rain off of Kakashi's cloak to hang, she hears a soft thud against wood, bends down to pick up the fallen object from her damp floor.

It is Asuma's pack of cigarettes, wrapped in the square-fold paper of his note. When she dismantles the covering, there is another piece of paper tucked in between the makeshift creases.

 _Light one up_ , the new note reads, but the strokes of each letter are too flimsy to be Asuma's writing. Which leaves only one person— _I won't think any differently of you in the morning._

She doesn't realize she is smiling until she goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth, sees herself in the mirror and barely even recognizes her own face.

He is not fulfilling promises, after all. He is _making_ them.

(She doesn't light the cigarettes, of course, not with a baby on the way, but she keeps it in her pockets at all times, just in case.)

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	4. four

**AN:** I try to keep in line with the manga's chronological events, but since there isn't really an official, concrete timeline, some dates and time intervals between scenes/chapters will just be me winging it lol. To my readers and reviewers, thank you once again for the support!

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Her cravings start moderately, innocuously, and then in earnest.

On Monday, takowasa, with double its servings worth of wasabi. The next three days, poultry, with fry batter so thick and crispy it is toxic, only to be found in the deepest slums of the Fire Country. Over the weekend, strawberry shortcake, the most appetizing of all the types of her least favourite dessert.

(Never dango, nor the tangy marinade of Yakiniku beef. Her psyche is well-trained to repel tricks of the mind, knows all the cravings she holds that she can no longer sate.)

Today, it is the salty broth of ramen that gives her reason to step out of her apartment.

(Little by little—)

"Kurenai?" Shikamaru says, once she has barely even lifted the tarpaulin drapes of Ichiraku's entrance. "You need anything? Is something wrong with the baby?"

Shikamaru remains finely attuned to her whereabouts, whenever she so chooses to be anywhere but home; if not privy to it, then he makes it his business. Some days Kurenai wonders jokingly if Shikamaru hadn't been placed in the wrong team, if he hadn't been meant for the squad of sensors that she leads—has led, she corrects mentally—and was only assigned to Asuma, to Ino-Shika-Cho, to uphold decades' worth of tradition.

More seriously, in prize moments of suffocation, she wonders if it would have severed any ties that him and Asuma may have had, any promises that would have been made to ensure her and their child's protection posthumously.

Mostly, though, it just reminds her that Shikamaru is not Asuma, and never will be.

"No," she answers, deliberately soft from the guilt she feels at the thought. It is not Shikamaru's fault for caring; it is hers for being unable to accept it on its own merit, to separate it from what is to what could have been. "Well, yes. Someone wants some ramen, and I don't think it's me."

Shikamaru's eyes follow the motion of her hand when she moves it to rub meaningfully over her belly, smiles in affection, and then in relief. "Just cravings, eh?"

"Just?" she mimics in deadpan, to which Shikamaru chuckles in deferral. Maybe if she had taught him, she thinks, he would have also learned how to demonstrate more respect for the plights of women.

"Don't listen to that idiot, Kurenai-sensei," Naruto pipes out loudly from the stool beside Shikamaru, overextends his back to give her a blinding grin and a thumbs up in support. "Us actual smart people know that ramen's more than a craving; it's a way of life!"

"This coming from the guy who couldn't figure out she was pregnant and thought she'd just eaten too much barbecue," Shikamaru mutters below his breath. Kurenai hears it, laughs, but Naruto is too preoccupied with offering her the only vacant seat in the store to notice either sound.

"Come sit beside me, Kurenai-sensei," Naruto invites eagerly, brandishes a menu in one hand. "I'll tell you which toppings your baby will like."

 _Someone with Naruto's unbreakable spirit_ , Asuma had told her on that night before he left, never to come back (she is done with illusions). _That's who I want our child to be. Anything else would just be an added bonus._

She had used to hold the belief that out of their wily batch of genin, Naruto was the most antithetical to his instructor: slow, brash, hot-headed. Looking at the white gates of his beaming teeth now, listening to the rattling shackles of his forced laughter, she admits to having been stood corrected: he belongs under Kakashi's tutelage. Only he would be able to teach someone like Naruto how to hone the ability to wear masks.

No one is truly unbreakable, after all is said and done. Some are just better at hiding the cracks than others.

"I'm sorry about Jiraiya-sama," she tells Naruto later, in confidence, after her first order of ramen and Naruto's fourth arrives, after Shikamaru is called away by a girl in round spectacles and haywire hair. She knows about the cryptograph they have been working on, knows a little something more about dying while being alive.

Naruto only laughs. She is not entirely surprised. "That old pervert? He must be burning in hell right now, having to hear you be sorry that he's dead when he'd used to spy on you all the time."

Kakashi still has much to teach him; although Naruto's tone is kept under tight lock and key, his eyes are bared open in his anguish. "He was still a great man."

Naruto bows his head over his bowl, resigned. "He was," he says darkly, fingers clenched around his chopsticks. A crack in his mask.

For a whole minute, he doesn't talk, doesn't eat his ramen. Kurenai loses her appetite, her earlier craving gone in an instant.

For a whole minute, Kurenai thinks that maybe he is not so different from the rest of them, as everyone touts him to be, but he proves her wrong; is Kakashi's student, through and through.

"But there's no use thinking like that. Always in the past," he says, and there are no chips or cracks to his countenance, his resolve mended anew. "Ero-sennin didn't die for the past. He died for the future.

"And in the future, I'll be a better man than he ever was." He taps the ends of his chopsticks against the countertop, realigns them in between his fingers with a smile that reeks only of authenticity. "So if your baby ever wants any ramen, tell it that Naruto-jichan's got it covered!"

And then she understands: Naruto's strength does not lie in being unbreakable; it lies in the fact that he _has_ been broken, time and time again, and yet he has somehow managed to come out of it whole.

He is Kakashi's student and more, but that is at least one thing to be expected; the next generation will always surpass the last.

"Starting with this bowl?" she asks, moulds her smile around the spoonful of broth she brings up to her mouth, even as the desire for the taste has long since deserted.

"Just leave it to me," Naruto grins, chest inflated in his smugness, up until he takes out his frog pouch and finds it completely empty. "Heh, sensei...on second thought..."

Kurenai ends up having to pay for her untouched meal, and then two bowls more for Naruto, but it is all fine; she has already gotten more than her money's worth.

 _Mirai_ , she thinks later on, to no one in particular, and then, specifically, to the one person who will always hear her, even when he is gone, _I'll name our child Mirai._

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She doesn't know she remembers where Kakashi lives until she is stood right in front of his door, a fist hanging in mid-air, debating whether or not she should knock.

 _Kakashi-sensei's caught some type of virus after our mission_ , Naruto had imparted to her, when she had insisted that he take her ramen home with him considering she had only taken one sip. _Knowing him, he'd probably be too lazy to prepare any food._ _Thanks, Kurenai-sensei!_

How she had ended up being the one to deliver it to him—that, she doesn't remember.

His cloak, washed and folded, rustles underneath her arms. It sounds much like guilt.

"Kakashi," she calls out, decides to forego her knock. "It's Kurenai, I've left some things for you outside your door. Come get them if you're inside."

No answer, but she doesn't really wait for one. She lays the bag of food down against his welcome mat, stacks his cloak right on top of it, and then turns on her heels before she can further break any more unestablished boundaries in their premature friendship, before she can think about why she had truly come.

She is just about to turn the corner when she hears the door of his apartment click open, along with her name, "Kurenai."

He sounds terrible, like the chords of his voice have been repeatedly doused and wrung out to dry. When she twists around to look back at him, he looks even worse: his hair sweat-matted across his bare forehead, his arms goose-fleshed and pressed tightly to his chest, the parts of his face not covered by his mask flushed an unhealthy shade of red.

She is disgruntled at the sight, but not because he looks the way he does; it is exactly because he looks the way he does, and yet has no qualms in _showing_ it.

Nonplussed as she is, she doesn't have much of an opener besides, "Naruto told me you were sick."

Kakashi's half-open eye droops down lower to look at the bag below him. "That explains the ramen," he says, before looking back up, at her. He speaks no further, but she still hears the words underlying his silence, _Doesn't explain why you're here._

It is a good thing that he doesn't ask the question out loud. She's afraid not having much of an answer has slowly become her pattern.

"It's actually mine," she says instead, by way of an elucidation. "My cravings have been kicking into high gear recently."

"I wouldn't want to see Naruto pregnant, then," Kakashi rasps out pensively, leans his body against his doorframe, as if no longer capable of holding himself up.

She doesn't entirely know what she's here for, but she knows what she's not: to be more of the burden she has become.

"I don't think that's how it works," she says briefly, before preparing to leave once again. "You should head back inside. You look like hell."

"Always with the kind words," Kakashi says tonelessly, like a door closed on that particular line of conversation, but to her surprise, he reaches a sluggish arm out sideways to open his apartment door wider.

"Well?" he asks expectantly, once he's picked up what she had wished to drop off at his door, and all she has done is blink wordlessly up at him. "It's _your_ ramen, isn't it?"

 _The thing with pregnancy cravings_ , she thinks secondhandedly, all in Shizune's educational voice, all in her convoluted head, _is that they often arise at the most inopportune moments._

She thinks she can see the outline of Kakashi's smirk when she brushes past him to enter his apartment, but she has already decided that her thoughts are no longer to be trusted.

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.

His apartment looks just as it had the last time she'd been here, close to four years ago: quaint, compact, tidy. Stunning in its minimalism, but also just as lonely.

How apt, she thinks, as she follows him into his dining space, watches him empty out his cupboards and drawers in kitchenware because he has only one of each.

"Ah," she hears him mutter at a drawer, scratching at his cheek.

"What's wrong?" she asks, sits down on one of the chairs at the table. He at least has two of those, even if only for posterity's sake.

"I only have one pair of chopsticks," he admits, confirming what she has already suspected.

It is a horrible, selfish thing to think, but there is a sense of companionship to be found in his loneliness, that she is not the only one to feel changed by a loss. "It's alright. There's some disposable ones in the bag."

He nods, pushes the drawer back in and lets it slam uproariously shut as he shuffles over to where she sits, sinks down onto a chair with all of his body weight and none of the usual refinement he has.

The guilt gnaws itself back into her gut. "Chivalry doesn't suit you," she says in reprimand, thinking of how he had walked close to forty blocks in the rain and refused his own cloak with twenty more to go.

"Neither does a high-grade fever, as you've already made me aware," Kakashi contests blithely, pours half of the ramen from Ichiraku's takeout container into his ceramic bowl. "But neither of those were in your control, so you should just let it go."

She almost startles at the echo of her own string of thoughts being verbalized to her, but she manages to keep her composure. Kakashi is many things, but he is not a mindreader. "Next time—"

"You'll bring your own cloak," Kakashi finishes in her stead, almost pointedly, but his right eye has closed in a bonafide smile. "That's all for next time, of course."

She doesn't even realize that those had been her words. _N_ _ext time_ , as if she is expecting things to happen the same way twice, as if he will always be around. As if that is what she wants.

She has never needed to depend on anyone. To act as if she does, even subconsciously—it is unbecoming. Frightening.

He slides her the bowl, keeps the plastic container for himself. An even half. "Here."

"Thanks," she says, snags the wooden chopsticks off the table instead of his metal ones before he can choose to be any more contrary. "Itadakimasu."

"Itadakimasu," he repeats, eyes her in mirth, and then immediately digs in.

He makes light work of his portion, even if she doesn't actually witness him in the act; she tries to keep her eyes trained on him, to see how he can eat with his mask, but for every split second she will look away to put a dent in her own meal, she will look back up to find the contents of his bowl somehow significantly decreased.

"You're impossible," she mumbles unintelligibly, only knows she means it once it's already been said.

"What's that?" Kakashi asks, believably sounds to be chewing even if she hadn't seen him take one bite.

She huffs out a soft sigh, gives up. Of the many mysteries Kakashi has been famously reputed for, what he looks like beneath his mask is the one that piques her interest the least. "Nothing." She had mostly been looking for something to do, anyways, in the absence of conversation.

The silence isn't what she would deem awkward, but it isn't entirely comfortable, either. In the event of an annulment, if anything were to be divvied up between her and Asuma, she had always used to say that Gai would go to her while Kakashi would be all his. She had meant it as a joke, but maybe some part of her had always known where her and Kakashi stood; that without Asuma, there would be no reason for her and Kakashi to be friends, let alone be sitting here in his apartment, eating tepid ramen, arguing mundanely about whether or not it had been her fault that he was now self-quarantined and stricken with the flu.

She almost laughs at the irony: somehow, it is in Asuma's death that they have found common ground to play at being more than just two aimless, miserable souls.

Kakashi sets his chopsticks down on the table with a clink, brings her out of her reverie with the noise. "How much do I owe you?"

His bowl has been stripped clean, almost looks to have been washed in soap aside from a few streaks of grease just below the rim. "You don't owe me anything. It's just half a bowl of ramen."

"I know Naruto. Half of anything isn't a unit of measurement he's familiar with," Kakashi says, chin dropping gracelessly onto his palm as he plants the adjacent elbow over the table. "And I know that he wouldn't be able to pay for all of those additional servings he surely got."

He looks exhausted—pitiful, she can finally spit back in equal measure—but all he sounds like to her is fond.

"Don't worry about it," she says, smiles in the safety of having both of his eyes closed. "He has a way of talking that makes you want to pay for every last bowl of his ramen."

He tilts his head, one eye cracking open midway. "Is that so?" Kakashi has his own way of talking, too, she realizes: saying so little but meaning a lot by it.

"You know he does," she says, lets him see her smile before it fades away into a bad memory, as it now so often tends to do. "And also...Jiraiya-sama came up in conversation."

If Kakashi is at all phased, then he doesn't show it. Maybe, like them, he and Jiraiya have never really been that close. "How was he about it?" Maybe he has already lost too much for another death to even register in the part of his brain that grieves.

Strength _and_ numbness, Kurenai thinks, when it comes to Kakashi. No blurred lines, not either or. It is a desolate existence, but who is she to cast judgment? She might already understand. She might even be halfway there, herself.

"Trying really hard, as always," she says, attempting to reassure, but Kakashi's face remains impassive. "He did seriously think I had just gotten fat from eating too much barbecue rather than being pregnant, so there is that."

A corner of his mouth twitches upward underneath his mask at that. "Sounds like Naruto."

She rubs a hand over her stomach absentmindedly, trying to soothe the trepidation that suddenly takes root deep in its recesses, the magnitude of what lies in front of them. Asuma is dead. Jiraiya is dead. So too is Itachi, but Sasuke has not yet come back. They have already lost too much; they are going to lose much more. "It's not looking good, is it."

Kakashi just looks at her for awhile, just as impassive as before, but that is how she knows that he won't be feeding her any lies. "No," he says, "It never does."

He has yet to lie to her, she notes. She doesn't quite yet know if that is a good or bad thing.

"I thought I'd name our child Mirai," she reveals candidly, repays his honesty with her own. "Am I still right to do so?"

He has yet to lie to her. He does not start now. "I don't know."

Maybe this is to be the nature of their friendship, she thinks. Telling each other the truth, even when it is ugly. Putting each other's feelings second, because who were they to think they deserved any sensitivity? They are a conduit of the village first, and their own person last. Their lives are not for them to live; they are for the village's to use, to lose.

"I'll clean up." He collects both of their bowls in one hand, braces the other against the edge of the table as he stands. When he sways enough to stumble on a step, Kurenai grabs the dishes from him and ventures towards the sink.

"I'll do it," she declares, before she can second-guess herself. "Lie down and rest."

Maybe this is their friendship: offering help, but not enough to thrive; just enough to get by. "Alright." She doesn't think she minds.

She washes their dirty bowls and utensils, wipes down his table, throws out the trash. Through all of it, Kakashi is sprawled across his sofa, seemingly undisturbed in his slumber, if not for the staggered rhythm of his breaths, the slight tremble of his hands.

She wonders if he ever truly sleeps. She knows she doesn't. Can't.

The cloak she's returned lies neatly atop his coffee table. Before she knows it, she has already draped the material over the length of his body, the fabric only reaching down to just above his ankles.

If he ever does sleep, then it must never be in peace. Both of his eyes open in alarm when the back of her hand accidentally skims the flesh of his neck while fixing the fit of his cloak, before the red of his Sharingan disappears just as swiftly behind an eyelid. "You've finished?"

"Yes," she answers, draws her hands back to her sides. His skin is burning, where her knuckles had touched, his fever wracking his body whole, but it is not hers to make her concern. Kakashi had already said as much, and she will follow his cues until she figures out how to traverse this—whatever _this_ is—herself. "I'm going home."

He nods shortly. "I'd walk you," he says, in his mangled voice, doesn't move a single muscle to match the intent of his words, "But I'm afraid I might be in the process of dying."

She smiles, can't help herself. Maybe this, too, can be their friendship: Kakashi, making her laugh, even when she no longer thinks she can. Even at the most inopportune of moments. "I'll be fine. Go back to sleep."

"Uh-huh." His eyes have already closed. "I still owe you."

"No, you don't," she refutes, reaches his front door, is about to say _thank you_ out of reflex before she realizes that she has already thanked him for all of his favours. She is reciprocating a friendship now, just as he had asked, and she is finally ready to make her own request. "Just—try not to die."

"I guess that's the least I could do," he drones unexcitably, and it is far from a promise—Kurenai can't afford to ask that much, not yet—but she still takes it.

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He would have broken it a week later, anyways, had he made it to be one.

Amidst the bedlam of their evacuation camp, Kurenai is the first one to hear Katsuyu's ominous whisper, "Hatake Kakashi is dead."

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 **edit AN:** Mirai means "the future", for those who don't know!


	5. five

**AN:** I talked about the timeline of the fic and how I'm just winging time gaps and intervals, but on a much broader sense I'm following a timeline created by Seelentau on the Naruto wiki. It says there that Asuma dies about mid- to late-ish October, and Pein attacks the following year in early January. I'll say that during the time Asuma left for the Akatsuki pursuit, Kurenai was about 1.5-2 months pregnant already (conception early September?), so around this chapter (after Pein's invasion) she'll be about 4 months pregnant (if I'm counting correctly lmao). I hope that answers your question, AkaneKimo! I've tried hard to search for the date Mirai was born, but could not for the life of me find an answer, so I'll be going with this decision haha. It's hard to create a timeline when the source content is littered with questionable time inconsistencies as well (Kishi really out here telling me Obito was able to control the Kyuubi AND go toe to toe with Minato within half a year of him getting the Mangekyo, WHILE half of his body had been crushed, WHILE only 14 years old? Nahhh.), but that's my one Naruto gripe over with for the day!

Thank you once again for all the reviews, favs, and follows! They all truly mean a lot to me, let alone that anyone even reads this story lol!

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She mourns him from the time Katsuyu pronounces him dead to the time she springs back into action to heal another influx of injured evacuees—a matter of seconds, and no longer than that.

This is what it means to be shinobi: to balance the fine margins of feeling too much and too little, without compromising either side in permanence. To be expected to spill tears one minute, and then a nation's river of blood, the next.

Still, she does not weep. You can stop participating in active duty, be put out of commission by your own choice or by the powers that be, but you can never truly stop being a kunoichi.

"Is it your husband?" someone says from beside her, a stout civilian woman with a toddler in her arms, sound asleep against a background of calamity. "That Hatake guy the slug was talking about—is he yours?"

She is not—will not—stake claim on him, even now that she had agreed to be his friend. Not that she ever really could; he can be hers just as much as Asuma had been hers—in sections and in moments of each, never both. The parts remaining, the ones that defined them most—they had all belonged to Konoha, if not entirely whole.

"No," she responds clearly, steadily, without so much as a lilt in her intonation. "He is— _was_ a friend." _My husband is already dead_ , she almost adds, but thinks better of it; husband or not, Kakashi now holds that in common with him: dead (and gone and never coming back—)

"Oh." The woman looks rueful, but not embarrassed. "You had that look on your face—and pregnant, too—so I thought, maybe—well, you know."

Kurenai doesn't, but she would rather it that way; rather that than the alternative, than acknowledging what her words would imply. At the most, she is willing to admit that her masks have been failing as of late, but that is just what comes naturally with being out of practice for months at a time, tells herself that that is the case.

"I'm sorry, anyhow," the woman says, rocks her child side to side when she begins fussing at a raucous explosion coming from outside. "If he died fighting whoever it is that's done this, then he's already a hero in my eyes. All you shinobi are."

If she can tell what she is without the gear and the story, then Kurenai must be worse off in her competence than she originally thought. "How did you know I was shinobi?"

"You said he was your friend," the woman states matter-of-factly, as if the answer is much too obvious to even need to be said, "Only fellow shinobi can be friends with shinobi."

And maybe it is. For as much as she wants to dispute the claim, Kurenai finds that she can't.

Any reply she could have had is disrupted by the woman's daughter, breaking out into a wail as her mother's efforts at lulling her back to sleep prove ineffective. "Shh, shh—it's okay, this'll all be over soon—"

Only fellow shinobi can be friends with shinobi, but all humans are the same: they all tell each other their best lies as long as it can get them through the day.

"Here, let me," Kurenai offers, taps two fingers over the groove between the child's eyebrows and has her immediately going back to limp.

"What did you do?" the woman asks her, voice sounding less rational in its panicked state, and Kurenai doesn't know what it says about her that she is more relieved by it than anything.

"Genjutsu," she hushes, smooths the child's forehead with the same two fingers before pulling them away. "It's nothing to worry about. I've just put her to sleep."

"Okay," the woman says skeptically, but pulls back on her haunches. "Thanks, I guess."

"No problem," Kurenai nods, takes a seat on the ground from the sudden pang of lightheadedness and nausea that rolls through her at the movement.

The woman looks to her with ample regard, even as she wraps a hand behind her child's neck to surreptitiously check for a pulse. "Are you okay?"

"Yes," Kurenai smiles tightly, fingernails digging into the soil below her. "Morning sickness."

"Tell me about it," the woman huffs, face scrunching up in displeasure, but otherwise looks appeased. "Hey, listen—do you think you can do that genjutsu thing on everyone else? The ones that are crying like hell, anyways." She sits down right beside her, alternates her child between shoulders until she seemingly finds a more comfortable position. "I know it's all fake and probably won't last, but it'd at least give them a little peace of mind for the meantime."

In this phase of her pregnancy, even the most minimal release of chakra has her off-kilter for days. Casting a basic genjutsu over one person—a child, even—has already depleted her of a considerable portion of her stores; a hundred people more, and that means definitively jeopardizing the health of her baby.

She could think of her civil duty, think of the vow she took to protect the people of her village, at the cost of her life, the parts of it that were her own. She could think of Asuma, too, of what he would have wanted, but he is dead along with rest of them, left her alone with a child and a will that meant nothing in the face of such destruction.

She could think it all over until she is blue in the face and driven wild to the point of no return, but she won't. Because she was a mother the moment she had felt that foreign spike of chakra in her stomach that at the same time had felt like home, but she was a kunoichi, first and foremost, before she had even been born.

But then again, she wonders, before she can cull all thought: why can't she be both?

"Uzumaki Naruto has arrived and is fighting the enemy alone," Katsuyu broadcasts loudly this time, meant for everyone within the facility to hear, "He has asked that everyone stay put until the fight is over, and that no one attempt to help him in his endeavour."

"Now _that's_ a hero," the woman mumbles in awe, and even if Kakashi would have deemed the title a misnomer for himself, Kurenai can't help but feel affronted on his behalf at his sacrifice being so quickly passed over; Kakashi, who had trained Naruto, even if it was only to draw out what had already been innate; Kakashi, who had always been on the brink of succumbing to darkness, but had always pulled his head over water just when everybody thought he would drown to the bottom—

—Kakashi, who had already lost too much, but had still unhesitatingly given the rest of himself away.

"I'll try to help most of them," she tells the woman, who looks at her without a trace of remembrance, but that is what it means to be shinobi: to be hailed and forgotten, all within the same day. "But I can only probably cast a genjutsu over a few people without it breaking on anyone."

She will not choose, but she will also not cower away. That is what it means to be _kunoichi_.

"Oh. Right," the woman says, finally remembering, with a feeble smile. "Do your best." She says it as if unimpressed, but Kurenai is not bothered; she is not a kunoichi for the praise, nor the recognition. She is a kunoichi because she has _faith_ , and that will not stop even when she isn't, even when they strip her of the name and the weapons and the scriptures.

Even if it is what kills her.

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In the end, they all live, but not for much.

In the end, the woman is still right; the little that they do have to live for, the little that they _can_ salvage—it is all thanks to one man: Uzumaki Naruto.

"Man, sensei, you didn't have to do this," Kiba gripes afterwards, thin-lipped and arms folded, when even she, as a non-combatant, has to be seen to by a medic in one of the military tents designated for rehabilitation. The village populace has been brought back alive, able in their zeal to rebuild, but the injuries they have incurred in the process persist at a lesser severity, requiring at least some degree of medical attention. "So what if a bunch of them were crying? They would've shut up eventually, anyways, we all had the situation under control!"

"You mean Naruto had it under control," Shino corrects bluntly, but turns to her with an aura of a parent looking to scold. "Regardless, I also think your actions to be ill-advised. There was no need to tire yourself out the way you had and put yourself at risk for total chakra depletion."

Hinata, with the evidence of her own misdecision bruised against her stomach, decides to come to her defense. "A-ano, let's not be too harsh on Kurenai-sensei, she just received some great news—"

"Don't _you_ start, Hinata," Kiba groans in remonstration, and Hinata clamps her lips shut, dodges all of their gazes. "Of all the stupid things to do, you really just had to—"

"That's enough, Kiba," Kurenai orders, even if he may not be under her charge any longer, even if she may superficially agree. What Hinata had done was rash, careless, but not entirely unfathomable; it had only been a few months ago that Kurenai had sworn not to love as timidly as she had used to, and she has always taken her vows seriously. "We were all just doing everything we can to help out, just as you and Shino and the rest of the village had."

Kiba puffs out his cheeks with all the air of his frustration, and then expels it in one blow. "Alright, fine. Sorry." He turns his body towards Hinata, but keeps his face stubbornly away. "Sorry, Hinata."

"It's alright," Hinata says, smiles with all of her forgiveness, and Kiba shrinks in on himself in contrition. With Hinata, it had always been her smiles that had held the best potential for revenge, only made deadlier by the fact that she doesn't ever wield it for that purpose.

The medic finishes with her healing, tells her one last time that the baby is okay, that her chakra is stable and halfway to replenished, and that she is free to go and take it easy. Kurenai thanks her for all of her help, and ushers Shino and Kiba out of the tent to give Hinata the privacy she requires for her own wounds to be dressed professionally.

"There's that idiot Naruto," Kiba points out, once they have reached the clearing where temporary residences have been erected while the village's rebuilding takes place. "Wanna go over there and make sure that he at least acknowledge Hinata's feelings now?"

In the distance, Kurenai can see Naruto looking adoringly at Sakura, despite the way she pinches at his cheek and nags at him for something they are too far off to hear. For a moment, she feels disappointed—even with such drastic change, some things will always stay the same—but then Kakashi steps out into view from behind a misaligned tent, and it is briskly neutralized by something far stronger, more visceral, by a feeling she can't and doesn't want to name.

"You guys go ahead," she tells Kiba, whose hackles rise in protectiveness, while Shino pins her a glass-shaded stare that achieves the same level of castigation. "I'm _fine_ , the medic even said so. Now run along and play nice."

"But you—"

"Let's go, Kiba," Shino says, already turned towards the direction of where Naruto and Sakura have started to walk in, and Kurenai smiles at his retreating back. Some things will always stay the same, she thinks, but maybe some of those some have no need to change.

"I swear to God, one of these days I'm gonna show you where you can shove that bossy attitude right up." Kiba cracks his knuckles deafeningly, follows Shino in spite of the threat, but not before giving her one last look-over, as if to ensure that she truly is as fine as she asserts. "The medic said to take it easy, too, so you better do just that, sensei."

Kurenai accepts it all in silence and in stride—their concern is finally warranted, even if it is just as overbearing—and watches them cross a few more rows of tents to the east before completing her own trek the opposite way.

She is not mistaken with her roof count; upon entrance to her tent of destination, the only person standing inside is Kakashi, trying to bandage his forehead in front of a steel tray, hung up against a linen wall by a contraption of strings and pegs.

The feeling resurfaces, knows now that she had not been able to pinpoint what it was because there hadn't only been one: along with her relief, there is the scalding, inexplicable surge of anger. "I told you not to die."

He spares her a few seconds of a glance, looks as bored as he always does. It would have angered her more, had she not allotted that same amount of time to mourn his death, but as it is, it is a feat that she is even able to keep it off of her voice.

"You told me to _try_ not to die," he smarts dryly, turns around to resume redressing his scalp, and Kurenai derives a small sense of satisfaction from seeing him struggle with it. "And I did."

And just like that, the anger has evaporated, the relief winning her over in spades with his pedantry. "Shouldn't you be letting a medic check that?"

"They've already got their hands full." The bandage comes loose at the crown of his head. "Good grief."

Her sigh is leaden, but her chest is airily light. One less ghost to haunt her in the night. "Let me do it."

This, at least, he listens to: stops immediately at what he's doing, scrutinizes her open palm as she walks forward, hands her the roll of gauze without challenge and sits down at the end of his cot.

It is almost comical, how hard she tries to avoid knocking their knees together while still being able to properly maneuver the bandages around his head. With her anger extinguished, it is shame that takes its place, stoked and heightened by the silence that envelops them, the unwavering consequence of his gaze with his head tilted upwards for her ease of access. She takes her vows seriously, but he had made her none; she has no right to be angry at him, if she even has any right to an emotion at all; if it is even _him_ she is angry at, if he is merely just a placeholder.

"I heard about what you did at the camp," he finally says, and if she had less pride than she does, she would have inched even further away. "Hoping to be a martyr?"

As it stands, pride is all she has left to thwart any rush of embarrassment, and so she runs with it at full throttle. "I'm not the one who actually died out there."

"How long will you be holding that over my head?" he asks with a sigh, so obviously performative in his exasperation. "Will it make it better if I apologized?"

He is in awful high spirits, she thinks irately, for someone who had just been resurrected from the dead not even three days ago, but she guesses that is the point of revival. She had read it once in a book, when she had the time (has nothing but time, now): most people who have straddled the division between the realm of the living and the dead had often come out of the experience not the same as they had been before.

There is no major change to Kakashi, though, besides a stronger propensity to annoy, but that could just as easily be a result of her more temperamental perspective. "What would you even apologize for?"

He has no immediate quip for that, and as petty and inconsequential of a victory as it is, she still tallies it as such under whichever game they could or could not be playing. "I'm not quite sure, actually. You just seem...upset."

She bites at her tongue for not knowing any better after all these years, for speaking too soon and forgetting that no one ever truly wins against a prodigy like Kakashi. Not even death, apparently. "I'm not upset."

"I believe you," Kakashi says sincerely, but the skin around his open eye crinkles in a beginnings of a smile. "How are you, then, if not upset?"

On the next cycle of gauze wrapping, she tightens her pull beyond the security it requires. "I'm fine. Tired, but fine."

If he feels it—and he must—he does not complain. It only succeeds in annoying her even more. "And Mirai?"

She is thankful to have had overstretched the cotton, even if it had been out of irritation rather than functionality, or it would have completely unraveled from the way her hand stutters at the mention. "I thought you weren't sure if I should name her that."

"Now I am," he says affably, but he is unsmiling, his tone brooking not a speck of disbelief, holding no vestige of a lie. Whatever it was he had encountered in whatever afterlife he had dwelled upon before he had been pulled back to the living, it must have been something so impactful to have him changing his tune practically overnight.

Or maybe he hadn't needed that much convincing. To die for a village, and then to live for it two, three, a couple more times over—isn't that what faith is all about?

"She's okay, it was mostly my chakra that got disturbed," she eventually replies, voice and touch more delicate than it had been before. What she had discovered on that day he had made his non-promise is that they are both realists; if Kakashi can tell her that he believes there to be a future to look forward to, then she will believe him—will have faith in him—as well. "Whatever you heard—I wasn't actively trying to risk anything. I know my limits."

She doesn't have a lot, in terms of insecurities—she knows them all intimately, accepts most of them for what they are—but when Kakashi looks at her right then, she almost feels every last one be scraped out of her raw. "I know."

It is for the very reason that he still has not lied to her that she lets herself be pacified by his words. "I'm a mother, but I'm a kunoichi, too."

"I know," he repeats, not said any differently from the first iteration, but his stare stores all of its added meaning, all of the validation she seeks. "I don't expect you to choose."

 _I_ , not _no one_. It should be limiting, conditional—how about her team? Her village? Her Hokage, if she even still had one?—but Kakashi has only ever spoken for himself, and all she feels from it is _free_. "How was it?"

"How was what?" Kakashi asks, and she smiles in triumph at the momentary lapse of bewilderment he had displayed at the non-sequitur, even if it had reverted just as quickly to dispassion. Maybe someday, she thinks aspirationally, she will get to pull the mat under his feet, instead of it always just being the other way around.

Someday. Because for the matter of seconds that she had fully realized that he was dead, gone, never coming back, she can now admit, even just to herself, that it had been the most painful it had been since Asuma had done the same; not quite equal, not as much, but just enough to make her realize that he _matters_ : to whatever extent, for as much as she does not want him to, for as much as she denies him space to be anything more than a transient thought.

"Dying," she clarifies, comes just short of reaching the scissors on the table, so Kakashi grabs it for her. "Thanks."

"You're welcome," he says, doesn't answer her original question, not until she finishes with his forehead and tucks the fraying ends of the gauze strip under layers upon layers of the same material. "Final."

She almost thinks it to be a comment on her wound dressing technique, and is only let down worse when she realizes that _that_ is his answer. "I see death hasn't infringed on your sarcasm."

"Nor how unimpressed you are by me," he jibes, with the resurgence of a smile, and Kurenai only scoffs as she heads back over towards the flaps of the tent, more than ready to leave in her renewed vexation, until, "I saw my dad."

She freezes, almost scared to turn around, but of what, she doesn't know. "I didn't—I'm sorry."

"What are you apologizing for?" he asks, a near verbatim copy of her earlier rebuttal, but with none of the snark nor the tension it had held with her.

"I don't know," she says, finally looks at him in full. He appears the same as he had during their prior conversations, as if he talks about his father all the time, as if his memory hadn't virtually decayed with his body when Kakashi had turned in his childhood for a life sentence much earlier than most. "I don't really know what to say."

He smiles, all that she had feared. "I don't, either." It is when Kakashi doesn't have a witty answer that she starts to be concerned.

Kakashi is not supposed to be her concern, but— "What did you say to him?"

"What all fathers want to hear from their children, I'm guessing," he shrugs, doesn't elaborate any further, taking the exchange to both of their graves. There are some things she would rather not know; even more that she is probably better off not knowing.

In another moment of selfishness, she lets herself be jealous, lets herself think of what she would say to her own father, when given the chance, what he would have been most proud of to hear; lets herself think of Asuma, of all the incommunicable hurt and grief and _anger_ that his absence had (has, will) wrought, and wonders if she would have been strong enough to want to be brought back to a place where she could no longer find him in the trenches.

But the moment passes—a matter of seconds, always—and she is back to where she'd started: standing alone, needing but refusing comfort, and Kakashi right there with her— _Copy Ninja Kakashi, Cold-Blooded Kakashi_ —mirroring every shape of her sorrow.

Unprepared she may be to take, she can at least be willing to give; if not comfort, then at least the honesty they have seemed to base this friendship on. "For the record—I'm glad you came back."

"I didn't really have much of a choice," he discloses, looks an inch just above her eyeline. Anytime else, and she would have probably used it to her advantage, but for now, she refuses to hold it against him.

"Do you at least have something here that makes it worthwhile?" she asks impulsively—is that something to say to a man who had pretty much just admitted to not caring if he dies?—but the question festers before she can retract it, morphs into something a little more introspective: does _she_?

"That's what I'm trying to figure out," he murmurs thoughtfully, and when his gaze finally aligns with hers, it is like he is answering for them both.

The future is bleak, meager, intangible. "The medic told me we're having a girl." The future is already with her.

"Been a while since the Sarutobi had a female heir," Kakashi says, demeanour back to slipshod, oxymoronic in its guardedness, and it is only then that she realizes that he had even let himself be open. "But I reckon she'll be fine, what with her mother going off and being heroic, and all..."

She doesn't know which of him she prefers—the fleeting or the habitual—but she has time to figure it out (nothing but time). "Not as heroic as dying."

"Maa, maa, not this again," he bleats, but his mask rumples to accommodate the rise of his smile, the drop of the subject, "Mirai's a beautiful name for a girl."

Her palm presses against the swell of her stomach, automatic. "It was Naruto who gave me the idea, actually."

"I guess we have a lot to thank him for," he says, voice as tender as she's ever heard. Beside him, the picture of his team glints under the sliver of waning sunlight that passes through the gaps on the doors, refracting at varied intensities from the cracked partitions of glass.

This is what they live for: what her hand holds, what his eyes see through a family of fissures.

"I'd walk you back to your camp," Kakashi starts, stands up and pockets his hands in the same fluid motion. "But I have to meet some people from Nami no Kuni who've volunteered to help with the reconstruction."

She laughs at the barest tickle of déjà vu. "Is this going to be the next thing you'll make excuses for? Failing to walk me to places that I can easily reach on my own?"

He raises a brow. "Are you upset about it?" The line disappears behind his forehead protector as he ties it over his fresh bandages, pulls it down to cover his left eye while he approaches her at the entrance.

She could be—at his subtle ribbing, at the truth in its hollows—but she isn't. "I'm not upset." He stands by her, and that is already enough.

(What she is: widowed and angry, a mother and a kunoichi.)

"Alright," Kakashi says, raises the tent flap with an arm and a hand to gesture her forward into the sunset; final, until the sun rises the next day, and then the next day, and then the next. "I believe you."

(What she isn't, never will be: alone.)

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	6. six

**AN:** Thank you once again for the reads, favs, follows, and reviews! Here's chapter 6 for you all!

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It must be a Sarutobi trait, she thinks, to have such terrible timing.

Asuma surely had it: professing his love a day prior to his departure for a five year-long expedition, committing himself to spite rather than to their erstwhile duty; proposing the idea of marriage in the middle of a skirmish with a group of Kiri nin during a reconnaissance mission, a ring brandished from his pockets as she had been trying to wash the blood out from underneath her fingernails; dying, just when she had finally come to grips with the idea of bringing a child into the world for as long as it was _theirs_ , not an offering they had no choice but to give to placate the hunger of the land that bore them, the land that they had _let_ hold their lives in fumbling hands.

His predecessors are of the same ilk. A clan dignitary arrives at her provisional lodgings an hour before she is set to negotiate her new lease with Sugimoto-san, asks her if she can spare an old man some time with a warm enough smile adding onto the lines of his wrinkled face.

 _This is going to be troublesome_ , she thinks with a sigh, and then promptly muses on whether or not she has been hanging around Shikamaru for too long. "Please come in."

They exchange pleasantries as she brews them some tea, with which Sarutobi-sama— _please, just Gakuto-san will do!_ —assists her in heating the kettle of water to the right temperature with a subdued katon. Power sources are scarce, he explains, with the village's reconstruction in progress, and thus should not be wasted on one man's oolong. The crux of the statement is carried over into the true purpose of his visit, one that he reveals as soon as their tea is poured and once she has sat herself down on the mat in front of him, straightening her back at attention.

"I will not mince words, Kurenai-san," Gakuto says, brings his cup to his mouth with sophistication so practiced it almost seems inborn, but Kurenai knows that not to be the case, simply for the fact that she had learned the same tricks as kunoichi, and that Asuma had always been far from ascribing to the orthodoxy of an heirly vision of grace. "I am here to discuss the matter of your marriage to Asuma, and what it means in regards to your standing in the clan."

In her youth, she had latched onto people's misconception that she was an Uchiha by virtue of her black hair and red eyes alone—fielding laymen's respect, intimidating any opponent who dared not look her in the eye, well-read as they were on their dojutsu bingo books. Amongst a herd of them, no one would have noticed the difference; that her hair never held the dull undertones of blue that was predominant across most of the clan, that her irises were bereft of the tomoe that wielded the power of the Sharingan; that when her palm laid above where her heart should lie, her mouth pledged fealty to Konoha above any mighty clan, reciting the creed of shinobi from memory the way a true member would have immediately assumed position away from the Hokage's right hand.

No one but an Uchiha himself, of course, but they had become shunned before any of them could, and then they had all died—all but one, she finds herself asserting in her head, one still lives—and suddenly pretending hadn't been much of a game any longer, just another weapon honed to the hilt as a means for her to survive.

The older she gets, the more that she sees, she realizes that being part of a founding clan is as much a burden as it is a privilege; if not for the politicking being forced unto her now, then for the seeming inevitability of their prestige devouring every last bit of vigour that a desperate man can keep. "I apologize if it had caused you any trouble, Gakuto-san, but Asuma and I believed that—"

"There is no need for explanations," Gakuto cuts in gently, smile wide and accommodating as he raises a hand between them to give her pause. "I understand what young love can make people do, and how it can make even the most filial of sons—not to say that Asuma was in any way filial, granted—rebellious."

She doesn't tell him that they had both already been thirty when they had married, five years past the normal life expectancy of the average shinobi, nor that rebellion had never been the driving force for them to keep the ceremony under wraps. For a man looking to be pushing seventy and mired in the stability of tradition, Kurenai knows there to be no point. "I'm glad that we have not caused much trouble, then."

Gakuto takes a long sip of his tea, stays silent. She has not yet drank from hers, sees no point in hiding nor stalling, either.

"Well, you see," Gakuto starts, once he finally sets his teacup back down on the table, laces his fingers together and places them on his lap. "In more...peaceful circumstances, I would agree, but considering the financing Konoha's—and by extension, the Sarutobi's—restructuring requires, I would have to say differently."

 _Those elders are fucking hacks_ , she suddenly remembers Asuma ranting to her after a particularly frustrating clan meeting, seeming to rip the stitches of his formal clothing off with the force of his yanks, _Can you believe the Third's the only one with an actual spine in that council? The goddamned Third!_ "I'm not quite sure I'm following, Gakuto-san."

She hadn't paid the outburst much mind at the time—Asuma had infinite and rational patience, except for matters involving his own clan—but watching Gakuto drink from his cup now, elongating his next couple of swallows, she finds it difficult not to understand.

"You are a knowledgeable woman, Kurenai-san, so I would be remiss to assume that you are unaware of the gratuity that comes with the death of a shinobi," he says, after another repetition of the same diversionary steps—sip, swallow, hum, lower cup—and her throat burns with something unattributable to the first gulp of tea that she takes herself. "As you may already well know, the clan receives part of it, but most of the money goes to any living spouse or children, as long as they are deemed legal under Konoha law."

The burn persists. She easily recognizes it as anger, now, but realizes that she has been angry for quite some time already.

"Seeing as any records of your marriage would have been destroyed during Pein's attack, and that the presiding guarantor has laid comatose in her bed for close to a month now," Gakuto continues, still overt in his efforts not to have their eyes meet, "I would like to ask, on behalf of the Sarutobi clan, if you would be so kind as to waive your rights to your share of the gratuity, in exchange for a place for you and your child under the name of Sarutobi."

She is angry at Asuma for leaving her in such a state. "With all due respect, Gakuto-san, there was no need to come here for that. I was never asking for compensation."

"Of course not," Gakuto says measuredly, elegance intact, belying the lack of couth in his words. "We are all deeply saddened by his death, just as you are. I did not mean to insult you with the insinuation that you were, but just thought it to be more discourteous not to ask."

She is angry at Gakuto and the rest of them for leaving her to put in numbers how much Asuma's death is worth. "I waive my rights to my share of the money."

Gakuto nods, satisfied, lets go of his cup. "There is also the issue of the child—"

"Mirai," she corrects, finally earns her a solid second of a gaze, "I'll be naming her Mirai."

"A girl," Gakuto deduces levelly, but in that solid second of a gaze, Kurenai sees the brown of his eyes reflect brilliantly, opalescent in his disappointment. "Well, as already mentioned, the Sarutobi will acknowledge your union with Asuma as legally binding, which thus makes Mirai the heir apparent to head the clan once she is of age. The council and I believe that it would be best to start training her in the clan customs as early as possible, and so—"

She is just so, so angry at always being _left_. "She hasn't even been born yet."

"And so," Gakuto intones, as if uninterrupted, and Kurenai berates herself for speaking out of turn, just as any woman of her standing has been trained to do. "We would like to be there when she _is_ born. The compound still requires a lot more work before it can be called a finished product, but rest assured you will have your own quarters there once it is fully reconstructed." When he empties the rest of his tea, his hand beats hers to the pot, moves to refill his cup himself. "For now, we are willing to fund your residential expenses, providing that we are aware of its location."

 _Providing that you are easily within reach for our usage_ , is what he truly means, and Kurenai knows it. "May I ask that I be given time to think both offers over?"

The poise of his pouring technique remains perfect, save for tilting the kettle a little too far forward at one point, overfilling his cup as a result. "Certainly," he says, manages to resume drinking his tea without spilling any of it on his robes. "But may I ask what there is to think about?"

 _How much our child's_ _life is worth to you. How much_ my _life is worth to anyone,_ she wants to say but doesn't, has been raised to exhibit utmost decorum, too. "I would just like to discuss some things with my previous landlord, is all. I will try to have an answer for you by the end of the week."

"Please do," Gakuto says evocatively, swirls the remains of his tea around his cup after draining half of it in one swallow. "The clan would like to have this matter settled as soon as possible, considering..." he trails off, brings his cup down to the table, the sound of porcelain against wood near silent in his propriety, the implications of the words he doesn't say reverberating loud and clear. "Well. I won't waste any more of your time, Kurenai-san. Thank you for the tea."

His fingers are icy, she notes, when he pats a fatherly hand against her neck, but Kurenai is used to the cold, barely even shivers as he leaves.

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Sugimoto's restored apartment building stands on the same lot as it did before it had been destroyed, looms tall and white above the horizon of two-story houses built of grey cement. From where she stands at Asuma's burial spot, she can see Sugimoto's outline through his window, barking madly at his wife as she meekly folds their laundry.

He is probably grousing about her, as usual, finally has a valid reason to now that she has failed to show up on time for their meeting, but Kurenai can't find it in her to care that she is late; she is much too busy formulating a viable excuse to tell him when there is nothing to Sugimoto—to anyone—that she can ever seem to do right.

 _This must be what Kakashi feels like all the time_ , she thinks wryly, and then stops thinking altogether when he materializes, as if summoned, in her rightmost periphery.

"I see you're still hellbent on freezing to death," he greets flatly, sidling up beside her like a dog on a leash, a gust of wind against leaves, can almost be described as long-suffering in his wooden stance.

She doesnt question him about where he has come from, nor about why he has come here now. Somehow, it has become second nature to her to become lost in her search for things past, only to be found by Kakashi, rooted to the present. "It gives you the chance to play hero one more time, though, doesn't it?"

"Chivalry doesn't suit me," he says, in a laudable imitation of her earlier supposition, but strips his travel cloak off to rest it upon her shoulders. "And I'm no one's hero."

She thinks to argue the contention, but ultimately decides against it; when she peers up at his face, the parts of it that she can see, she detects none of the lightheartedness that his words had conveyed. "Definitely not mine," she concurs instead, albeit the joke coming out a little weak.

Kakashi smiles down at her, unreadable as always. "Glad to know we can finally agree." And as always, Kurenai backs away from the challenge, knowing that when Kakashi gets like this, any win that she might tally would just end up being another meaningless victory.

She won't assume to suddenly know him from just a handful of interactions, but she can't go back to treating him like the stranger he had been, not when she looks at him and finds him surrounded by the same thin strands of self-control that has been holding her up for weeks. "They're sending you out on missions when they've just declared war?"

"Isn't that exactly the reason why they should be sending me?" he shoots back, crouches down on his heels to write something on the soil with his hand. "But no. I just came back from reporting to the elders about what happened when I was in Iron Country."

She remembers Kiba paying her a visit, delivering her a basket of Hinata's tea herbs and news from the high streets. _They've made some guy named Danzo Hokage. Last I heard, he and his entourage are on their way to Tetsu no Kuni for some kind of large scale political dick measuring contest with all the other Kage, or whatever._ "You went to the Kage Summit?"

"Not really," he says, fingers still scribbling at a leisurely pace. "Naruto wanted to try and convince the Raikage to rescind Sasuke's status as a missing nin."

 _They say that he's ordered Sasuke to be killed on first sight,_ Kiba had said roughly, scratching behind Akamaru's ears, and for the first time since she has known him, Kurenai hadn't been able to gauge what it was that Kiba—who had always worn his heart on his sleeve, who looked at most things like a canine would, in mosaics of blacks and whites—had been feeling. "And did he?"

"A bond made between brothers is hard to break," is all Kakashi says, before standing back up at full height. He doesn't clarify if he means Naruto and Sasuke or the Raikage and his own brother, but the weariness in his limbs like unoiled springs is enough of an answer.

"I'm sorry," she says, doesn't truly know what else to, doesn't know whether he is reeling from a current loss or one that has been four years in the making. "Maybe the new Hokage will listen, when he comes back—"

"Neither are likely," Kakashi says, looks up at something far off in the distance. When Kurenai follows his line of gaze, she is met by all the heads of the previous Hokage, carved indelibly into stone. "Seeing as Sasuke was the one to kill him just two days ago."

"What?" she husks out in horror, before she can think it through, but Kakashi doesn't react, stares fixedly not at any particular bust, but at the smooth surface of rock right beside the Fifth's. "I can't believe, at a time like this—four Hokage, dead in our lifetime."

"Three," Kakashi amends, tone almost harsh, clipped, "Tsunade-sama's still alive."

It is not saying a lot, but for the first time since she has known _him_ , Kakashi banks on false hope. "It's been three weeks since she went under, Kakashi."

"A lot can change within a few days," he says, but from the muffled quality of his voice, the distant sheen in his eye, she can't entirely be sure who to. "But you're right. Someone else has to take on the mantle until she wakes up."

She has learned better than to doubt him, but always makes the mistake of labeling him too quickly. He is still a realist, still a strategist, but still just as human in all his caveats—the little that he does have—all the same. Kurenai should know; her life, for the past twenty weeks, has been nothing but her trying to choose between one or the other, and failing, over and over, to come up with a concrete answer. "Have the elders put up a new candidate for election?"

"Yeah," he says, and when he does, she knows him to be looking straight at the Fourth. "Me."

He is no one's hero, and yet— "Oh, I—Congratulations."

"Don't go bowing and calling me _Hokage-sama_ just yet," he chides, tears his gaze away from the statues above them to regard her with a roguish look. "Tomorrow's when I'll be officially inducted, and even then the jounin still have to vote. I'm still just Kakashi for now."

"I wasn't going to bow," she denies in monotone, but feels the flush sprouting just above her collarbones, sees the way he traces it branch up to her face with an errant eye.

"Looked like you were," he says, near childish in his capitulation, and it is so ridiculous, to think that in twelve hours' time, someone like him is to be their Hokage, just as equally as it makes the most sense to her out of everything that has transpired over the past five months.

She has pledged fealty to Konoha and to each of the four—three—heads of state that have died in her lifetime. "And so what if I was?" She will do so again, without question, because for all that Kakashi is her Hokage, now, he had been her comrade—her _friend_ —first, and she trusts that when she places her life in his hands, he would sooner take his own before he would ever take hers. Wasn't that his nindō?

"Save it for someone more deserving," he says, eye darting back to sweep over the stone faces of his predecessors, the bit of space that will immortalize his own, and it is all that she needs to know that there is no one else who would deserve it more.

"Only if you save the self-pity for someone who actually needs convincing," she snaps fiercely, drowning as she is in her own, sharpens her anger into new blades and stores them away, knows that this isn't the right time, the right battle, for her to bring them out. "You don't need my vote." He already has it.

Kakashi does the same; shoulders sagging, jaw unhinging, all of his fighter's instincts suppressed for another day. "If that's what Sarutobi-sama commands, then who am I to object?"

It is just like Kakashi, to be so defensive one second and then be so antagonizing the next, but Kurenai is familiar enough with the way he spars to be able to parry it. "Hokage-sama would do well not to call me that."

With only half of his face visible, she can't quite tell if it is a flinch she sees before he turns to arch a brow at her in curiosity. "Something wrong with being called by your name?"

"It's my name only if I abide by certain conditions, apparently," she says, the words too acerbic for her own taste, looks down at the ground to avoid any judgment and finally notices what Kakashi had been drawing all those minutes ago: Asuma's name, sunken deep into the soil, engraved within a rectangular border like that on a granite headstone. "Sarutobi Gakuto paid me a visit to hash out the finer details of our marriage." If he looks at her in anything other than apathy, she still doesn't see it, has already sat herself down beside the faux grave Kakashi has created and sketches in what has been left missing.

The symbol of Konoha splits the two of them in the middle as Kakashi takes a seat a foot away from her, back curved in pronouncement and legs splayed perpendicularly, never been one to champion the importance of proper body etiquette. "What were the conditions?"

"That I give up my share of Asuma's death gratuity to the clan in exchange for them legalizing our marriage," she relays, as dry and impersonal as giving a mission's report. "And that Mirai be trained in the clan customs as soon as possible."

Kakashi nods once beside her, murmurs out a, "Makes sense." Despite herself, Kurenai almost feels estranged, disenchanted, but then realizes how insensible she is being; once Kakashi is Hokage, there can only be room for impartiality, orders doled out on a fair hand, labile feelings a mere afterthought to analytics and precision. Their friendship—for however much influence it may truly have on either of them, for however long it should last—doesn't come with conditions; like him, she will not expect him to choose between sides.

"Their reputation's taken quite the hit ever since the Third died," Kakashi expands, anyhow, as if justifying himself against her inner allegations. "They haven't really had an official clan head ever since, since Asuma wouldn't assume the position." He leans forward, plucks a stray slip of paper that sticks out from the dirt when the wind blows from behind them. "With war looming, they're probably worried about their place in Konoha's clan standings. They're scrambling to restructure before whatever clout they have left can be extinguished entirely."

It is information she already knows, one that she has already inferred on her own, but the confirmation of its accuracy only proves to make her feel like more of a tool, unearthed and discarded for other people's pleasure. "I know Konohamaru's still too young to be heir, but at least he's _alive_."

"Heir presumptive," Kakashi adds, reads whatever it is that's written across the strip of paper before deftly crumpling it in his hand. "They probably think sticking to tradition will bode better for them, so they want their heir fresh and firstborn."

She laughs sombrely at the way he puts it: like they are breeding animals, rather than daughters or sons; like their personhood is a matter of inherent circumstances, rather than it being a collection of choices.

"To think that I'd always wanted to be part of a founding clan when I was younger," she laughs again, more dismal than the last, because only a shinobi of the highest calibre can present their sorry fates as is without being cowed, and if there is anything Kurenai has ever truly known about Kakashi, it is that he is nothing if not the most consummate of shinobi. "If I only knew it'd be like this..."

For a few moments, she is only met by contemplative silence—Kakashi is consummate in this, too: being the voice of reason, even when he speaks no words—but the wind picks up and Kakashi says, "Uchiha Kurenai," and all of a sudden, the dour mood lifts, bashful nostalgia settling within the vacancy it leaves.

"Don't," she warns, forcefully tucks her hair back behind her ear for lack of anything else to do to retain her dignity, but even with only half of his face visible and most of his mask muddling his expression, she can already tell he is smiling.

"That was the name you introduced yourself by in the Academy, wasn't it?" he proceeds anyways, almost melodious in his taunting. "Uchiha Kurenai, the youngest to have ever activated the Sharingan."

"Stop it," she says firmly, ducks her head down to hide her shame, but more so to hide the fact that she is now smiling, too. "It was only for a week, and then Obito came and told me to knock it off before he told his grandmother on me."

Just as quickly as she had gone from grim-faced to grinning, she immediately reverts back, bunches up her other hand at her side in the fabric of Kakashi's cloak, the rest of her body tensing beneath it. How stupid of her to forget, just because there is no longer a memorial stone for Kakashi to bide his time with, to be both his excuse and his underlying reason; that just because she can now call him her friend, to think that she has any right to bring up his ghosts, to cross all the lines he has drawn around himself like an elegy inscribed onto packed soil.

But Kakashi doesn't do any of that: just smiles even wider, like it is the fond memory it is supposed to be, speaks of it in a way she has never heard him do before. "Only because I'd told him that you weren't really an Uchiha," he says, chuckles, too intimate of a sound, and even with the foot of ground still maintained between them, Kurenai feels much too close to him than she should. "Before that, he'd been grumbling about how unfair it was that he wasn't the one to activate his Sharingan first."

But she doesn't move away, can't find it in her to. "Is that why he was glaring at me that whole week? Not because I was just pretending?"

"He'd always been a little thick," he says, angles his neck sideways to cast her his smile, and she can't find it in her to look away from him, either. "But he had his moments."

It is him who turns away, head veered back towards the stone monument, smile receding into another line that separates them into two. It is what she had wanted, had hoped to retrieve, and so she should be relieved, but all she finds herself feeling, as she looks on at him, is a strange sense of dismay.

She says nothing in response, nothing else to say, but Kakashi seems to have some still left. "It's a good thing you aren't an Uchiha."

At the very heart of it, she knows why—can't _not_ know why, when she can see the answer right there in front of her, could taste it in the back of her throat when the scroll of her re-conscription had arrived—and yet still, she can't help but ask him, "Why?"

"They're a pain in the ass," he says frankly, as if to continue purporting a decades' long generalization, but Kurenai knows that that is not what he intends; Kakashi, after all, has only ever spoken for himself, and that is the one constant she can count on during this whirlwind of change.

She has been naive to think that a friendship would not beget expectations, but even worse is to so readily assume that he would not ask her of the same. _It's a good thing you aren't an Uchiha_.

"You sound like Shikamaru," she says, but thinks in her head, hand over heart, _I hope not to let you down_. "He'd make a great advisor for you, if you're looking for one."

"I'll save him for Naruto's tenure," Kakashi says decidedly, like Naruto becoming Hokage is a matter of _when_ and not _if_. "What about you? Think you'd be up to the task?"

Her brows furrow, eyes slanting into a glare. He is joking, surely, just as he always does, but even if he was being serious with his proposition, she would not be of any use to him in a role like that. "I don't have half the brainpower that you and Shikamaru possess, and even if I did, I'm still pregnant. I'm not even in commission."

His eye stares at hers unblinkingly, before moving somewhere more towards the left, stopping where her ear should be. "I thought you said you were both."

 _I'm a mother, but I'm a kunoichi, too_. "Not during war," she says, feeling as cold as she had been when she was talking to Gakuto, feeling as if just within minutes of taking her vow, she has already let Kakashi down. "Not when—"

 _Not when Mirai could die_ , she doesn't finish, but Kakashi has double her brainpower and more losses than she can ever contest with, and so she knows he gets it. _Not when all of us can_ _._ Death spares no one, takes and takes on a whim, and even if the smartest of shinobi can escape its clutches, it does not mean that they keep on living.

She had often thought, before she had truly observed him—before Asuma, before their friendship, before she could begin to understand how grief can make them tick—that Kakashi was one of the smartest people she knew, just as well as, at the worst of times, he was probably the most empty.

But not today, not anymore. "Still doesn't sound like you should be renouncing anything," he says, looks at her with piercing clarity, "There's more to being a shinobi than serving on the field."

He is her friend, and he is her Hokage, and in this moment, she believes him to be both, words at once a reassurance and a testament to her skill. She thinks of Gakuto, of the Sarutobi, of a whole clan trying to take Mirai away, and thinks, finally, that if it had to come to blows, the mother in her would protect her daughter, while the kunoichi in her would fight for nothing less than a win. "I still can't be your advisor."

"Doesn't hurt to ask," he shrugs, back to noncommittal, gaze dulling down by degrees as it roams once more to her cheek. "You have some dirt on your face."

She raises an arm up instinctively, tries to scrub at the spot he is looking at with the back of her hand. "Is it gone?"

"No," he says, so she tries again, only for him to shake his head. "Here."

He reaches his own hand towards her, breaches their foot's divide, and when he brushes a thumb against her cheek, she takes note of two things: that he does not have much calluses for a seasoned shinobi, and that his knuckles, grazing her jaw, are much warmer than she expects them to be. "Thanks."

"No problem," he says, wipes off the dirt he's collected on his hand against his thigh, before using it to push himself off the ground when he stands. "Where are you staying at these days?"

A third: when he extends the same hand out to help her up, there is no hesitation for her to take it. "My old apartment's been rebuilt."

He looks up to where Sugimoto is now drinking his afternoon tea, stood outside his balcony in a rare moment of peace. "So it is," Kakashi says, inclines his head in the direction of the building. "Is that where you're going?"

A fourth: not once has he ever tried to leave her. "No." Five months (weeks, days) ago, she would have been insulted, but not today. He is her friend, and he is her Hokage, and she knows now that he has never doubted her; not in either capacity, not in any way that she had used to doubt him. "I'll stay here a little longer. You go on ahead."

He does not ask her why. "If you're certain." The mantra in her head changes, _I_ will _not let you down_. "Don't bother returning my cloak. You always seem to be needing it."

If she were to be truthful, she had almost forgotten that he had even given it to her, unable to differentiate between the warmth of a garment and the warmth of his company. "If that's what Hokage-sama commands." Being honest with herself was never the vow she had taken, however, so when it comes to this, she doesn't bother keeping her veracity.

"Oh, jeez," he sighs, brackets his hands over his hips, and it is harder to hide a laugh than a smile, so she doesn't bother doing that, either. "How about this: you don't call me that, and I won't ever call you Sarutobi-sama. Deal?"

"Deal," she says, and for as small as it is, that is their first promise. "Just Kakashi, then."

"Just Kurenai," he returns, before walking away with a hand held up in goodbye. "See you around, Just Kurenai."

She looks down at the ground, reads the kanji of Asuma's name, memorizes Kakashi's handwriting little by little until she is ready to forgive— _your only choice was to leave_ —and to be forgiven— _I'm sorry for forgetting_.

Half an hour later, just as she is about to leave, she stops at where she approximates the memorial stone used to be and pays her respects to the rest of those she had forgotten.

 _Uchiha Obito_ , she writes, bows as low as her stomach permits, and then she finally thinks of her excuse as she walks out of the cemetery.

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.

In a less forgiving mood, Sugimoto would have cursed her away, but all he does is grunt brusquely at her when she tells him that she had decided not to sign on for a new lease after figuring out that it had been the Sarutobi clan to tell him to offer her her old place. "You got somewhere else to live at?"

She doesn't, but she will keep on searching. "Not yet." Asuma had no choice but to leave, but right now—in the future—she will ensure that Mirai always, always will.

"If you're really set on avoiding those pesky Sarutobi, I got a contact on the opposite end of town who'd just been told to oversee this newly built apartment complex recently subsidized by the state," Sugimoto says, clicks his tongue as is his habit, before sighing heavily in disappointment, "You shinobi always get on my last nerve with all the ruckus you make, but it definitely sucks to lose your business."

"I'm sorry, Sugimoto-san," she says, probably—hopefully—the last time she ever will.

Sugimoto just swats a hand her way. "Yeah, yeah. You want her information or not?"

 _I was_ _lost on my way here_ , holds little credibility, as far as excuses go. "Yes." But it had been the truth, and that makes it just as good as.

(She doesn't end it with, _and then I was found_ , not when Kakashi is to become Hokage, not with a war nipping at their heels; he already has too much on his plate to burden himself with another one of her thanks, and she is intent to keep all of her promises.)

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 **AN:** Seeing as there's not much information about the Sarutobi and Konohamaru's parents, for the sake of this story, I'm going to say that Asuma had been Hiruzen's firstborn and that the clan isn't as honourable as one might perceive (just like Hiruzen himself, lol *is fond of Hiruzen as a flawed character*).


	7. seven

**AN:** A heartfelt thank you once again to everyone who supports this fic by reading, sharing your thoughts in reviews, and keeping track by faving and following!

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There is not much packing to do, not much left for her to still own, but Kiba comes over to help box her things up nonetheless, saves her the exertion of having to seal them into chakra bound scrolls and gives her time to stow away the valuables that she won't be able to transport.

He retires on a wooden bench, once the task is complete, extended from the outside paneling of her interim residence, watches her in discreet fashion as she toils away at clay pots with glass jars and a pair of rusting clippers. He tells her that she smells starkly of the outdoors—of wet earth and beating sunlight, of the petals of a spring bloom—before launching into one of his usual tirades, fangs peeking out from underneath a petulant scowl. "Can you believe Kakashi-sensei?"

She strips her gardening gloves off, wipes at the sweat forming along her hairline with her bare hands. The mid-March heat is only at its genesis, the weather still balmy and clement, but she has been on her knees for what must be close to two hours now, collecting seed pods from poppies on the back of burning incense sticks at an altar laid barren. "Believe what about him?"

Kiba has procured a glass of water for her by the time she sits up on the bench, dusts her knees off to him dropping down beside her with tempestuous fanfare. "I asked him to train me, and what does he do? He sics his dogs on me like I'm some kind of prime T-bone and runs off with a lame excuse!"

She is his jounin teacher, so she will back Kiba to a fault, but unobtrusively— _unexpectedly_ —she has become steadfast in also wanting to lend Kakashi all of her support. "He might not be the acting Hokage anymore, but he's still been appointed commander of one of the war platoons. I'm sure he's just busy."

"That's what he said, too," Kiba carps, before pillowing the back of his head with both hands as he leans against the wall in resignation. "Why does _he_ have to be the only jounin available I can go to for help? This fuckin' stinks."

He does not mean to slight her, she knows—Kiba never does, barks and howls and yips at the hands that feed him but never, ever bites—but something pits out in her gut regardless, remorse anchoring the heft of her next reply, "I'm sorry. As your team leader, I should be the one helping you out."

Kiba rubs at the back of his neck, matches her compunction tit for tat. "Damn, sensei, I didn't—you don't need to be sorry! You've got Mirai to worry about, and we're technically all too old to even still be a team." He flashes her a grin, looking every bit the boy he had been, the boy she still sometimes wishes him to be. "I mean, we're all good enough to be sent off to war, aren't we?"

 _Was_ his jounin teacher, she rights herself, and this time it finally sticks—for as hard as she tries, for as fervently as she wishes, she can no longer shield him from the atrocities bound to happen negligible of his age. "Still. I just wish—" _That I could do something more. That I could keep you all sheltered so none of you will ever get hurt_. She bites down on her tongue before she can continue speaking in taboos, but every next syllable only ends up blocked in her throat anyways; the words tripping all over themselves in their error of judgment, in their frantic rush to be heard.

But Kiba has her covered; has her back just as she has his. "No time for wishing," he says, hands on his knees as he stands, shoulders broad enough to block the noontime sun, a good three feet taller than the picture of him she has idealized in her brain. "We just do what we can. That's all there is to it." No longer her subordinate but a shinobi in his own right, a shinobi with his own autonomy to _do_ rather than to think in _should_ s.

What she should be, in turn, is proud— _a jounin teacher's duty is complete once she has trained her genin to become the best soldiers they can be for her country_ , her father had said, hand at her shoulder as she had marveled at her mother's concentration, tattooing the symbol of the ANBU onto one of her students' left bicep—but she isn't. What she is, what she can be—it is all fueled by fear.

"Come on, sensei, or you'll be late for your check-up," Kiba says, Akamaru waking up from his nap just beyond her roof's shade at the edict in his voice. "Shizune-san's been busy rallying the medical troops, too, so let's make sure not to waste her time, yeah?"

If they were to go by official ranks, she is far beneath him in spades, demoted for the very same reason that she is now being heralded as the beacon of Konoha's dimming light. _If nothing else, survive long enough to give me a grandchild with whom you can pass our will onto_. "You're right." She pretends that to be the reason why she follows, pretends to be mollified by his smile, pretends that even as she chooses what she prioritizes and is a thousand miles away from blitzkrieged terrains, she is still doing everything there is that she can.

Always pretending.

(If nothing else, she is still good for that.)

Upon Kiba's suggestion—if not his injunction—she grabs a cloak from inside her quarters, notices him stilling when she passes by him at the door. "Is something the matter?"

"I thought I still smelled—" he clamps his mouth shut as if muzzled, teeth clacking sonorously with its force, and then he says, "Nothing, sensei. Let's go," as he walks on ahead of her, Akamaru faithfully in tow.

She dons her cloak, buttons it up at the neck, leaves the rest of it unzipped. "Coming." With Kiba no longer watching, she doesn't have to reign in her confusion, doesn't have to keep on pretending at all.

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Shizune doesn't waste any of her own time.

(Even with this, Kurenai is unneeded.)

 _Bed rest for a month_ , she had proclaimed after just five minutes of her assessment, lips sawed down into a straight line, hands glowed a muted green over her belly as her eyes had hardened while scanning the sheet of paper that had contained the results of her urine test. _You can shower and do other menial day-to-day activities, but you really shouldn't be on your feet for too long, so no outings unless you're coming here for a check-up. Lie on your left side as much as possible, and take on as little stress as you can for the rest of your pregnancy._

When Kurenai had asked her exactly how much longer that would be, she knew Shizune's smile to be just another product of pretending.

(Even when she is doing nothing, death still hangs over her shoulder, patient, watchful.

Waiting.)

Kiba tries valiantly to distract her as they walk out of the clinic, makes lewd jokes that should be beyond even his maturity level about the images spread across the birthing pamphlets Shizune had sent her off with— _there's been a chemical spill two rooms over_ , she had exclaimed, dumping the papers on her lap as she had sped right past her eyesight, never to return to authorize her discharge, _I have to deal with it or no one else in this place will!_ —but Kurenai had already tuned him out tens of steps ago, mind no longer whirring about but gravitating towards something more trivial, something more specific.

She had forgotten to ask whether or not she will still be able to do some gardening.

"Hey, sensei." Kiba tugs at the sleeve of her cloak, brings her head and her feet to a grinding halt. "Did you hear what I just said?"

"No," she says, swallows down her, _I'm sorry_. It is tiresome, to always only have an apology on offer, and Kiba had already made it clear that apologies aren't the entirety of what he needs. "Say it again?"

He sniffs in indignance, but she can tell that it is mostly put on; for her sake, she thinks, and tries not to feel too sick at the thought. "I said: your new apartment's not too far from here, right?"

She had ended up having to pay Sugimoto four months' worth of rent in exchange for his silence—the war inches closer with every wane of the sun, with every wax of the moon, and so she is, should be, less of a concern for anybody, but she doesn't put it past the Sarutobi to keep her under hidden surveillance, doesn't put it past Sugimoto to sell her out under constant pressure and needling—but he had been ingenuous when they had discussed the suitability of the apartment complex he had been suggesting, told her of all its glowing benefits and how it was relevant to her situation: almost close to being on the outskirts of town, located on the western part of Konoha where Sugimoto's apartment and the Sarutobi compound stood to the east. Far enough for selective obscurity, but not too far off from the main village square to be completely secluded from the community. "It's about three blocks away, give or take."

"Why don't you head on over there? Me and Akamaru can bring a couch and a box of clothes over so you got something to sleep on and change into for the night," he proposes, slings a companionable arm around Akamaru's scruff when he barks once in agreement. "You were gonna move there in two days, anyways, so might as well do it now that you're already in the area."

Defiance courses through her at his insistence, ready to be contained and marshaled, but Kiba's eyes are far too kind, untainted, to ever be an enforcer. It is the only war she can partake in, now, trying to disassociate his and everyone else's concern from being belittled, and for that, there is nothing else she can do but be sorry. (Always sorry.) "That's not a bad idea, actually."

"Of course it isn't. I thought it up, didn't I?" Kiba grins, crooked and self-important, no longer a boy but still seeking her approval, so Kurenai ruffles his hair to give him just that; maybe not what he needs, but what it is he asks for, right now.

Kiba agrees to let her walk the three blocks to her new apartment alone, but his chakra signature doesn't budge from where she had left him until she steps inside the building, spikes turbulently when she knocks at her landlady's door and finds a red eye and a half-masked face peeping through the crack. "...Kakashi?"

"Oh, Kurenai. It's just you," he drolls in greeting, hides his Sharingan behind a closed eyelid as he opens the door to reveal his body in full. "You need something?"

He is only wearing an undershirt with his standard issued pants, the rest of his uniform hung over the back of a dining chair when she hazards a look behind him. None of the surrounding furniture looks to be any different from when she had visited a week ago to sign her lease, but the only trace of her landlady to be found is her indoor slippers laid out orderly across the rug to the left of her doorway. "I need...why are you here?"

Kakashi looks to be asking her the same thing. "Recuperating," he answers eventually, after he balances his weight against the jamb of the door and his normal eye surveys her clothing in ostensible approval, "I needed a place to sleep for the night, and the old lady who owns the building's been kind enough to lend me her apartment."

She is no medic, has taken great pains not to be—she certainly wouldn't be one of Shizune's expertise, even if she hadn't—but it takes her even less than five minutes to assess him: eyes red-tinged, dark circles swelling underneath, the pads of his fingers dotted with blood clots, as if pricked and bitten into excessively. "You look like—"

"Hell?" he anticipates correctly, unflappably, and she realizes that it is an observation she has made about him far too many times for it to still hold much meaning. "I've been training. I seem to have overdone it a little bit."

 _A little bit_ , is an understatement; like all the times before this, he looks about ready to collapse. "I just need to know where Nankichi-san is, and I won't bother your rest any longer."

"It's not a bother," he says, but retreats back inside the apartment, picks his book up from a couch cushion to sit directly in its place. It should count for a dismissal, the way he ignores her for the drivel he reads, but he leaves the door hanging wide open and continues on with his speech, "But you actually do have to stay here a little while longer if you want to talk to her. She's out running errands, and won't be back for at least another two hours."

That is enough time to go back to the old house, she thinks, where her own couch should still be—where she can lie down as sentenced, be held hostage by her worries—but when Kakashi's eye lifts up from his copy of _Icha Icha Tactics_ to pin her with a look, she finds herself crossing the threshold, moving of her own accord and her own two feet.

"There's some tea in the kettle, if you want something to drink," Kakashi says desultorily, as if owning the place himself, but his manners display the opposite to be true: feet off the upholstery and glued firmly to the ground, a coaster lining his teacup against the surface of the table; shows the respect of a guest, mindful of the footprints he leaves, but also exudes the comfort of someone who feels right at home.

"Thanks," she says, walks to the kitchen to pour herself some tea, all the while wondering if she is playing house or stumbling into a domestic dream; about the life she had led with Asuma, the life she had been slated to lead, only for her nights to be plagued by memories turned foggy and her days to be clouded with unceasing banalities.

She doesn't, has never dreamt about Kakashi, but the feeling it brings her now, settling beside him as he sits barefoot, relaxed, enjoying his break—it is cozy, resplendent, isolated from anything that can upset his tranquility.

Amongst other things, she laments that loss the most: the moments of unadulterated privacy from the worst of her thoughts. "How do you know Nankichi-san?"

His eye doesn't stray away from his book, engrossed and distracted as he answers, "She's a family friend."

While lacking focus, Kakashi doesn't say needless words, but she still debates at length over whether or not he would welcome her conclusion, "Your father's?"

"Yes," he says agreeably, calmly flips a page, but says nothing more about it. "And you?" She doesn't pry.

The tea has cooled down some even before she had poured it out of the pot, but it is still good, nevertheless; rich in flavour and aroma, better than the serviceability of the brew Nankichi had concocted for her previous visit, better than anything she can fix up herself, in her own time. It could be Nankichi having a good day, a good blend, a good harvest, but somehow Kurenai doesn't believe any of the three to be correct—even at her most saccharine, Nankichi's tea had been mediocre, and the only plant within the four corners of her apartment is a single cactus, leafless and decorative and self-sufficient.

She thinks, inadvertently, of her own father, of him picking her up from the Academy a week after Hatake Sakumo's death, of how he had looked on at Kakashi sweeping the classroom floors and derisively said under his breath: _Without parents, orphans grow up to become excellent housemaids, at least._

"She's my new landlady," she divulges, sips at her tea, savours the crispness of the chamomile and the tartness of the lemon, the guilt that comes along with it for having had tolerated her father's cruelty. "It's why I'm here. I was supposed to move in next door two days from now, but Kiba suggested that I do it today."

She thinks she sees his focus break at that, gaze flying towards her in interest, but it is gone before she can certify it with any type of confidence. "So we'll be neighbours for tonight, then."

"For tonight," she nods, discomfited for some unnameable reason—not nerves, because Kakashi doesn't make her nervous, but he does, has always, kept her on her toes—so she doesn't try, decides to change the subject instead. "He has a bone to pick with you, by the way."

"Does he," Kakashi mutters offhandedly, but shifts his eye away from his book for longer than a nanosecond this time for her to be sure that he is looking. "What about?"

His eye is hooded, lethargic in its movements, but his stare stays crystalline; a tantō halfway pulled out from its saya, she likens, now that it is their childhood that supplants her thoughts. "He said he asked you personally to train him, and was disappointed to have been left with only your ninken." _The White Fang_ , she recalls without difficulty, but it is not exactly a forgettable name; its legend is only as infamous as the mystery shrouding its fate.

She wonders if he still has it, or if, like its namesake, it has already been long lost. She doesn't ask; until he invites her in, until he says that she isn't, she is a guest to his past as much as he is to hers. (Knows her station; refuses to rise above it.)

"Pakkun did say he seemed unnecessarily fired up," he mulls, reaches towards the table for his tea. The faded red of his ANBU tattoo, once razor-edged, now dulling with age, is all she zeroes in on at the motion. "I know Guruko and Bisuke can get a little mean-spirited when sparring. I apologize for anything they may have said in the heat of the moment."

It is not an apology she is angling for—she has much too many of those already—nor should it be to her that he is apologizing to, but she accepts it in all its superficiality, plasters it over the growing ache in her chest that she can no longer keep at bay. "It's fine. Soon enough he's going to be encountering things much worse than mean-spirited, so it should still count for training."

Where Kakashi remains sharp, astute, she has only been beaten and worn down; voice brittle, bent, iron turned to rust. There are many things to hate, many she already does, but none as badly, as all-consuming, as how she has grown to loathe herself.

She runs her fingernails down the serration of her cup, lets Kakashi's gaze slice her apart. Unlike him, she had never been much good at handling swords; her father had never let her. "You're worried about him."

Kakashi has taken it upon himself to only speak in understatements. She is not just worried; she is absolutely _terrified_.

"How can I not be?" she murmurs, isn't sure if it is the tea that leaves a bitter aftertaste or the resentment coating her tongue. "They're just kids. They're not ready to go to war."

He closes his book shut, places it down beside the coaster of his teacup, the lines of his shoulders squared. Focused. "We were much younger when we went off to war ourselves."

"And we were just kids back then, too," she argues, and suddenly the childhood she has come to remember doesn't hold up as much of a childhood after all; when cadavers were what they had to toy with for dolls and losing a game of hide-and-seek had meant certain death. "If anything, we were less ready than they are now."

Kakashi, of all people, should be able to understand. "We survived, though, didn't we?"

She chews at the inside of her cheek, hard enough to draw blood. Never has she thought a day would come when Kakashi would be subject to her overestimation. "Not all of us."

Kakashi brings his cup down to rest on one knee, drums his fingers stuntedly against the other. "Not all of us," he reiterates, "But we're still alive."

She scoffs, "Are you?" and she knows it is mean-spirited, knows it is cruel, but she can't take it back, maybe doesn't even want to; it has often been said that Kakashi is a spitting image of his father, but so, too, is she. _Are we?_

If he is hurt, or disgusted, or—or _anything_ by her words, then he doesn't look it; hides behind a façade, like always, is better than her by all accounts—a better person, a better shinobi, a better pretender. "What are you really upset about?"

She freezes, the fire in her veins cooling off under the thaw of his stare. It is not him she is angry at; it never is, and yet all she ever seems to do is use him as target practice, not once being able to land a devastating hit. "I don't know. I'm sorry."

And there it is again, her worthless apology. But Kakashi says, "You don't need to be," and he sounds just as Kiba had sounded, means it just as, and it is all the sincerity she can fake, can take.

"I just feel..." she starts off in a whisper, looks down at her cup, fixates on the ringlets forming above the tea surface as she quakes inside and out. "Useless. If anything were to happen to them, there's nothing I can do to help. I won't be able to save them." _Even when I_ am _here, there's nothing I can do to save anyone._ "I thought I could be both, but it looks like I can't even be either."

She doesn't say what it is she can't be, either— _a mother, a kunoichi_ —fears its chant like a curse, but there is a dawning in Kakashi's gaze that lets her know he doesn't need her to, the validation of her inadequacy that she has been wanting and waiting for all along—

But all Kakashi says is, "A friend once told me to save the self-pity for someone who needs convincing," and it is both for better and for worse.

There has always been far too much of her father in her than she would like to admit, than she has ever brought herself to acknowledge. "Some friend that is, huh?"

"She's got quite the sharp tongue," Kakashi says, and it is only amusement that crests in his voice. "But she meant well."

Sometimes, it feels like she means nothing. "And you knew this how?"

"I didn't," he says, speaking circularly as always, but when she snaps her head around to reproach him, he doesn't look to be joking. "But I do now."

 _We do what we can_. "Is it so wrong for me to want to help out even when I know I can't?"

"No," Kakashi says, arm contracting as he fists his fingers experimentally, curling and uncurling. "Just as it's not wrong to want to be helped out once in a while, either."

Said so simply, it can almost pass as a kindness, but while he is revered by many names, half of which Kurenai now knows to be untrue, being gentle has never been what extolled Kakashi as such an indefatigable force.

It would probably be too much, she thinks, as she watches him flex his charred hands, the symbol of the ANBU distorting with each shift of a muscle, even for a man who cradles lightning at the very ends of his fingertips.

"You still haven't gotten rid of your tattoo," she points out; shifting gears, cutting her losses. "Why?"

"Never really got around to it," he responds, once he has blinked off the whiplash—maybe she is getting good at that, too, veering him off course; becoming less predictable, as she can only hope, "I don't mind. It helps put things into perspective."

 _Even storms have companions, musume._ This time, when she rifles past eighteen years of voices in her head, it is her mother's that rings the loudest. _Thunder crackles to pave the way for lightning to strike._ "Did it hurt to get it?"

It is laughable of a question—tattoos are nothing but a flesh wound, and Kakashi has been an active shinobi for more than half of his life—but he does her another kindness, humours her with an actual answer, "It wasn't that bad during, but it stung for a couple of days right after."

"I remember watching," she says, Kakashi quirking his brows in question, so she gives him an answer of her own, "Not you, but someone else."

 _I'll be marking your friend today, that Hatake boy. Would you like to watch?_ her mother had asked one autumn morning, brushing through the tangles of Kurenai's hair, hushed so that her father couldn't hear from where he sat eating his breakfast. Kurenai doesn't remember what it was that had made her refuse—apprehension, probably, for what her father would say if he found out; maybe even jealousy, for Kakashi's quick progression up the ranks, for having no father to hold him back—but she remembers what she had prayed for at the temple that night: to receive even just an ounce of Kakashi's luck, the good and the bad.

How vile she had been, in retrospect; how vile she still is now. Eighteen years or eight months back—she had always been the lucky one between the two of them. "I could never tell whether it was ink or blood that was actually leaving a mark."

"Both, probably," Kakashi says, and she is surprised to realize that she has reached a hand out, fingers tracing over dried ink, re-etching invisible spirals over the marks on his skin.

More surprising, though, is that he lets her. "Do you regret leaving?"

A muscle spasms underneath her touch; jumping away from her, as she probably deserves. "Not really. More so having to be told to leave because a couple of people thought it was within their rights to ask on my behalf."

She draws her hand back as if electrocuted; Kakashi's reinstatement to the standard forces is not something she would, could ever, take credit for—that will always go to Gai—but becoming involved had been just as natural and indomitable as Gai's hope, as the blush on her face when Asuma couldn't stop looking at her with pride as they had trekked towards the Hokage Tower. Kakashi and her had never been close, but they had also never been as far apart; that time when he had more blood than ink on his hands and shadows for smudges dragging at his limbs, and she had known how wrong it was, knew that she had to do more than her part for it to stop. "We weren't trying to—"

"I know what you were trying to do," Kakashi interjects, but it is neither steely nor stilted, and Kurenai recognizes it the only way she knows how: he is grateful, plain as. "Thanks for your help."

 _We do what we can_. She wonders if this is what Kiba had learned from just a quarter day's worth of being Kakashi's disciple. _That's all there is to it_. She wonders, in all her despondency, when it was that she had stopped learning herself.

She drinks the rest of her tea as answer, refrains from curling up into the sofa the way she wants to, the way she probably should; compared to Sugimoto, Nankichi is teeming with hospitality, but she is the sort to treasure her solitude. Kakashi's presence is enough (always enough); Kurenai would only be intruding.

But Shizune had been forthright in her orders, her warnings, so Kurenai does as she's told; moves to lean more towards her left side, misadjusts, and almost rolls over the edge of the couch without the security of an armrest, if not for Kakashi catching her with a nimble arm.

"Careful," Kakashi says, plucks her spilling cup in one hand as he pulls her by the wrist with the other. "Mirai trying to spring out of the womb so early?"

His palm, without the added layer of his glove, feels much warmer than she last remembers it being, but it doesn't do much for the frost in her response, the cold that is encroaching, "Don't say that."

Kakashi observes her keenly as he steadies her; sword at the ready, preparing to incise. "Sorry."

She winces at the word. "No. I'm—" she stops before she can say it herself, again, takes a deep breath in its place. "It's just—with the pregnancy, they've found a...complication. Shizune told me that I have to stay on bed rest for the next month if I want to stop it from progressing."

Kakashi's hand lets her go, but not his gaze. "Will Mirai be alright?"

Will any of them be? "I don't know," she says, and that is the worst part in all of this—not the hysteria bubbling up her throat, nor the uselessness tattooing against her skin, but that wretched, wretched sense of her not knowing. "I'm scared." She is done with pretending.

Kakashi, for his part, finally looks away; gives her the privacy to wallow, to hurt, to be who she rightfully is at this moment, to be who she had vowed herself not to be. (Quiet and cautious and fearful and—)

"My father," Kakashi begins: almost quietly, almost cautiously— "Used to tell me that being scared is what makes us alive." —but never seeming to be in fear. "That it just means we have something better to live for. Something we can still fight for not to lose."

 _Hatake Sakumo is nothing but a disgrace_ , her father had used to tell her, _You better stay away from his kid; it runs in their blood. Genius or not, he'll just teach you more of the same thing._

Her father had used to tell her a lot of things.

"Are you?" she asks again.

It takes a while, but Kakashi answers her with sheer honesty; upstages the vitriol that runs in _her_ blood, what has been stitched into her by link of genetics, "I am."

Scared or alive, he doesn't specify, but maybe he doesn't have to; maybe, with time, she can think of them as being one and the same.

Outside of getting him out of the ANBU, she had never committedly campaigned for Kakashi to become a jounin teacher; he had all of the requisite skills and physicality, but none of the relatability to make him worthwhile. Year after year, she had watched him fail batches of genin, often wondering if she had made a mistake in asking for his reassignment, if he was already lost, if it was already too late.

But maybe that is the whole point: that the best part of him finally succeeding was the uncertainty that came before it; that wretched, wretched sense of her not knowing.

"I know you'll be much busier, now that you've been appointed war commander," she says. She doesn't know what it costs for him to talk about his father, for him to invite her in an inch, but she will repay him to the best of her ability; trying, in baby steps, to do what she _can_ , to do what it is that's needed. "But if you wouldn't mind..."

Kakashi blinks tiredly as he stands, but there are no steps missed, the expression on his face static even as his voice sounds unconvincingly chagrined, "You want entertainment tips from the expert on month-long bed rests. I get it."

She smiles, less daunted by the prospect he tolls. A month could mean everything, or it could mean nothing, but by no means will she let the fear win; she will befriend it, just as she had befriended him, nurture it until it is no longer the same fear. "Not exactly."

It is never too late, she decides; not even for Kakashi, who is most notorious for it of them all. "Well, if ever you do—just come and find me."

 _Harbinger of Storms_ , she had heard some people call him, had always thought it to be the moniker most fitting— "If only I could. I'm on bed rest, remember?"

—but all she sees now, as he passes by her for the kitchen—the sun that he hides with his smile, the suffusion of heat that comes from his understanding—is the calm that comes before it. "Then I guess I'll just have to come and find you."

.

.

.

Not even a day later, he makes good on his word.

She drifts off sitting on Nankichi's couch, in Nankichi's apartment, lulled by the sound of running tap water as Kakashi washes the teacups, the kettle, the stack of dirty dishes filling the sink. When she comes to, she is horrified to be awoken by Nankichi herself, shaking away at her shoulder mildly, but is satisfied to find out that she had somehow oriented herself to lie on her left side in the throngs of her sleep. (If not a little confused—Asuma had told her once of how it had always spooked him to see her sleeping so perfectly still, but that was also way back when he had still been alive, the last time she could still properly sleep.) Kakashi, when she gives the room a quick once-over, has already disappeared.

Nankichi brushes away her apology before it can even be said— _I've had two kids of my own, dear, so I know that pregnancies can be downright_ _exhausting!_ —so Kurenai is spared from falling back on old habits. They smooth out the wrinkles of her financing, discuss house rules and maintenance visits and where she can grow her poppies, and then Nankichi approves her request to move in, gives her the apartment key, pulls her in for a long hug when Kurenai offers up a hand to shake, "Welcome to the abode, Kurenai-san!"

There is still no sign of Kakashi even as she leaves, but Nankichi mentions him in passing when she walks her out to the hallway, "I hope Kakashi didn't cause any trouble while you were here waiting, but don't you worry: before he left, I told him how inappropriate it would've looked to someone else to open the door and find him reading those books of his while a woman slept right across from him, and that he should be thankful it was just me! But I think I nagged his ear off a little too much, so if he's still there waiting in your apartment, please do tell him I'm sorry." After much convincing that he was no trouble at all, that he is her friend, and that she trusts him completely—not without the slightest hint of mortification and the shallowest grit of her teeth—Nankichi finally closes the door and ends their conversation in amity.

Kakashi isn't at her apartment, either, but there is a bed where there hadn't been a week ago, queen-sized and quilted for the approaching summer; much too big for one person, much too cold for the ongoing spring. Much too lonely to sleep in through the night, when she isn't spending large chunks of it staring at her ceiling.

(Much too tempting not to lie in for a whole month, twiddling and crossing her fingers, without feeding into her pervading fear.)

Kiba arrives fifteen minutes later with a box labeled _CLOTHES_ in his arms and her settee propped up on Akamaru's back, tied and secured around his body with a long piece of twine. He says that he's sorry he took so long, he got sidetracked along the way, and can you believe that training with Kakashi-sensei's ninken had become surprisingly entertaining?

"I didn't tell you that so you could tell him," Kiba grouses, when she smiles and wonders out loud what Kakashi would have to say to that. "I guess I'm happy that you guys seem to be getting chummier, and all, but the guy's still an annoying perv, just like his star pupil." Before she can ask what exactly he means by that, he has already slipped past her front door with a, "See you at the housewarming party, sensei!" and whistles for Akamaru to stand from his keel.

The fatigue creeps back in before she can deconstruct his statement, anyhow. She sets up for sleep: takes a shower, puts on a clean set of clothes, takes the pillows and the comforter from her new bed and moves it to her couch. She walks to the window with the intention of closing it, warding out the night's chill, but what she finds atop the ledge stops her in her tracks.

The same copy of _Icha Icha Tactics_ that Kakashi had been reading on Nankichi's couch, in Nankichi's apartment, with a note stuck behind the hardbound cover: _Tip #1: Find yourself a great book to read._

Kurenai shakes her head, laughs softly to herself; doesn't take it off her windowsill, but doesn't seal her window shut, either.

.

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 **AN:** I try not to write ANs that are too long (barring that first chapter lol), but what the heck, this chapter seems to call for it, so here goes!

1) The reason why Kurenai's been ordered bedrest is because she has preeclampsia. I didn't want to get too much into the jargon of it in writing bc I felt put-off at using official medical terms in a Naruto fic (even though Kurenai was out there diagnosing Hinata with ventricular fibrillation all the way in Part I lmao), but for anyone who's not familiar with the condition, it's basically high blood pressure during pregnancy that can cause a myriad of fetal and maternal complications if left unmanaged, and can be fatal for both the baby and the mother once progressed to the more severe type, eclampsia.

2) Another "for the sake of this fic..." note: this fic is supposed to be a kind of coda/fill in the blanks to canon (and by canon, I mean anything Kishi has either written himself or has given a stamp of canon to, i.e. manga & light novels), but I will take from some filler content every now and then if it fits the situation (bc would I be a fanfiction writer if I didn't? lol); specifically, in this chapter, I used filler episodes such as Kakashi training Kiba, and Gai + Asuma + Kurenai asking the Third to relieve Kakashi of his ANBU duty. Also, I'm pretty sure manga-Kakashi doesn't have his ANBU tattoo anymore, but for the sake of this fic (there's that disclaimer again lmao, I'm sorry!), I'm going to abide by anime-Kakashi's design and make him still have it.

3) Also, headcanon alert: Kurenai's mom was an ANBU commander, her father is somewhat sexist (or maybe that's already canon?) and somewhat of a jerk, and they tell Kurenai a lot of things, lol.


End file.
